


Into the Depths

by airgeer



Series: Far From Home [2]
Category: Glee
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:52:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airgeer/pseuds/airgeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The New Directions are an amateur adventuring company that dreams of being heroes. Their dream comes true, but not the way they thought it would.</p><p>Part Two: The kids find an abandoned fort in the mountains, but it isn't as empty as it appears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into the Depths

_Death is a part of life. We’re born, if we’re lucky we grow old, but we always die at the end of it. Dragons may live for centuries, but even they grow old eventually. Humans are like a flash in the pan to them. Even the gods may die, though in a different way from the rest of us. Death truly is just another part of life, children, like birth and love, and it isn’t always to be feared._

 

_But neither is everything always exactly the way it seems._

 

~*~

 

Mercedes jerked awake, her head dropping from Kurt’s shoulder to the thin bedroll underneath them with a jarring thud. Artie, apparently already awake, pressed his hand into her back to keep her from pushing further back into him, and Kurt smacked his lips quietly but stayed asleep.

 

Mercedes stared up at the canvas of the wagon top, barely visible in the darkness and took deep slow breaths to shake away the dream she’d been having. They’d stuck to the road for almost a week now, stopping only to rest the horses. When the sun had come up that first day and illuminated the mountains ahead of them, Mercedes had nearly cried. The mountains were completely unfamiliar, and they had no idea where they were. Sure, they were west of a mountain range, but how far south or north of the mountains that they knew were they?

 

The sobering realization that they had no idea where the road was taking them had affected them all. When it was added to what Sorin had said about Lilsholm, the entire group had fallen into a quiet depression and they had focused in on what they thought was the immediate best choice, putting as much distance as they could between them and the place where they’d fought Sorin last.

 

Mercedes wiggled out of the pile of people and cloaks being used as blankets that the floor of the wagon had become and carefully stepped over Quinn, Brittany and Santana, cuddled together in a group that would have been sweet had she not actually known the three of them. She pulled her own cloak around her shoulders, huddling into the warmth it provided as her breath froze in the wintry air. They’d made the wagon as airtight as possible whenever they stopped for the night and the front and back were covered all the time so the people on watch when they stopped could sleep when they were moving again, but it was getting colder steadily and there was only so much they could do to warm it up at night.

 

She slipped out from behind the hanging fur blanket covering the front of the wagon, blinking at the early morning sunlight. Puck and Lauren had taken the third watch, and were silently moving about, looking out into the forest and up and down the road for anyone or anything approaching.

 

It had been too peaceful for comfort. They hadn’t come across anything living in the last week, and Mercedes had begun to wonder if they were the only things with a pulse for miles. She could feel the group getting tenser day by day as they kept waiting for something, anything to happen, but nothing ever did.

 

Their makeshift campsite began to spring to life as more people awoke. Mercedes went about her morning routine as the sun began to slowly peek over the mountains. She untied the rope that held the bag with their food supplies up high in a tree and lowered it to the ground. They hadn't seen anything living, but that didn't mean there wasn't a distinct possibility of a hungry bear wandering into the wagon during the night if they stored the food there.

 

She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed back around the wagon, to where most of the group had gathered. Finn smiled at her blearily as he relieved her of the food, and Mercedes did a quick head count, furrowing her brow as she realized who was missing.

 

It was uncharacteristic of Kurt to be the last one up. When they’d gone out on trips before, Kurt was always the first one awake, citing his need for personal hygiene trumping his need for sleep. Ever since Sorin though, he had seemed exhausted in a way that Mercedes couldn't heal, and it was worrying.

 

If she was honest though, none of them were doing well. She knew that most of the group had been having nightmares of some sort, judging from the way that everyone looked haunted in the mornings, and she was no exception. They didn't know for sure if Sorin had been telling the truth about what she had done at Lilsholm after they were all unconscious, but what she had said had been more than enough to put dreams of her parents and little brothers dying horrific deaths into Mercedes' brain.

 

She climbed back into the dark wagon, squinting at the change from dim sunlight to barely any light at all. Kurt was sitting upright, at least, fully dressed like he'd intended to leave the wagon but decided just before he did that it was too much effort. He didn't turn around to face her, instead staring fixedly at one of the wooden arches that held up the wagon cover.

 

"Kurt?" Mercedes said hesitantly. "What are you doing? We're getting ready to go soon."

 

He spun around to face her, like he honestly hadn't heard her approach. "Sorry, sorry, I was just thinking." Mercedes held the cloak up, letting in a small amount of light that illuminated Kurt's face. The night's sleep hadn't removed the dark shadows from underneath his eyes, and he looked upset. That wasn't unusual in the slightest though. Everyone was upset and exhausted. Kurt was just the only one acting like he wasn't all there.

 

"No you weren't," she said quietly, pitching her voice so the others would hopefully not overhear. "I've been letting you get away with this, but I'm not anymore. We're having a conversation later, and you are going to tell me what's wrong. You are not fine, none of us are, and you're scaring me, Kurt."

 

He tilted his chin up rebelliously, and Mercedes stared him steadily in the eye until his expression wavered. When he looked away, she let the cloak covering the front of the wagon swing down behind her and knelt down beside him.

 

“Look, I’m just worried about you, okay? You’ve been acting really weird, and I know I’m not the only one who’s noticed. We’re best friends, you can tell me anything, you know that, Kurt. Please talk to me?”

 

He sucked his lower lip into his mouth and looked back up at her. His hands fidgeted idly where they rested on his legs, and Mercedes laid a hand over top his closest one to still the motion. He looked away again before he spoke.

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine.” His tone was quiet and firm, with a faint hint of guilt, and all of Mercedes’ instincts screamed at her that he was lying.

 

“Kurt, you can’t keep doing this, please-”

 

He shook his head sharply. “No. Thank you for your concern, but no. I don’t remember anything, so there’s nothing to tell.” He covered her hand with his and squeezed slightly before standing up and leaving the wagon quickly.

 

He was lying to her. The first thing he had said to her during their escape was to ask how much of what he remembered had happened. Lauren had followed him into the wagon and come back out grey in the face and snapping orders, and Mercedes didn’t know her well, but she didn’t think she scared easily. She had been obviously wary of Kurt, and Mercedes thought that she must have demanded information from him and had gotten a little more than she’d expected.

 

Kurt knew something, maybe he knew a lot, and he was lying about it to everyone but had told Lauren. It wasn’t like him, and it didn’t make sense.

 

Her imagination was working overtime, creating possible scenarios that got worse and worse as she ran through them.  _No_ , she snapped at herself.  _You’re being ridiculous_. It was still Kurt. They'd been best friends for over a year. They'd joined the rangers together, as brief as it had been, and she'd held his hand when he’d thought his father was going to die. She knew Kurt as well as she knew herself, and if there was one person she trusted completely in their group, it was him. There must be a good reason for him to be keeping it a secret, and Lauren must have come to the same conclusion.

 

Mercedes nodded her head decisively. Maybe Kurt had a good reason to lie, but when it was hurting him she had a responsibility as his friend to pry it out of him. Lauren certainly wouldn’t tell her, but if she got Kurt alone and made sure he couldn’t escape her, she could make him spill.

 

~*~

 

Puck awoke from his doze when the wagon came to a stop. The third watch was better than the middle one, but it still sucked enough that he needed to catch up on sleep during the day. He didn't think they'd been moving that long, but he could hear Rachel chattering excitedly, and as much as he wanted to roll over and ignore her, he thought he'd better check it out if it was important enough that they were stopping.

 

Lauren already had her hammer in hand and was pulling aside the cloak at the front of the wagon. Mike and Tina were also awake, maybe even still awake if they hadn't been traveling for long, and everyone else had been walking alongside the wagon.

 

Puck followed Lauren out of the wagon, blinking in the crisp daylight. Rachel was standing in the middle of the road with Finn right behind her looking perplexed. Puck followed their line of sight, and ended up looking at a stone fort built into the mountainside, maybe a few hours hike up a narrow path that would be overgrown with greenery in the summer, but now the stone of the path was visible through the dead plants.

 

“It’s old,” Rachel said in an insistent tone of voice. “It’s definitely from before the Spellplague, and it’s uninhabited, judging from the lack of any smoke rising from the chimneys. We may be able to find a map that will tell us where we are in relation to home.”

 

“Rachel’s right,” Artie said, grimacing as he agreed. “Lots of places were just abandoned, and there could useful stuff up there. It’s not like we actually know where we’re going now; we might as well take the time to look. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

 

“Yeah, ‘cause that sounds like us,” Santana scoffed. “We get lucky breaks all the time.”

 

“Well, what do you think we should do then?” Artie snapped back. “Just keep going along the main road without any actual direction until Sorin comes back for us?”

 

“I don’t know if you remember, but I never voted that we stick to the road. It’s going to get us killed.”

 

Puck sat down on the wagon seat beside Mike, waiting for someone to break up what would probably be a short fight if Artie pissed Santana off enough. Sure enough, Mercedes was in there in seconds.

 

“This is not helping,” she said in calm voice, but with an undercurrent of tension on her face. “We can’t fight each other or we really are going to get ourselves killed. We’ll take a vote. Who thinks we should go up there?” She raised her own hand, and most of the group followed suit. Santana raised her and Brittany’s hands together without hesitation, and Artie scowled at her as he raised his. Hummel waited the longest, but when he realized he was going to be outvoted no matter what, he made it unanimous. “Okay then, looks like we’re going.”

 

Everyone grabbed their packs out of the wagon, and Puck picketed the horses loosely. If they didn’t come back the horses were screwed anyway, but he wanted to give them a chance to get away. They pulled everything of use out of the wagon, and started the hike up the steep path.

 

Puck took up the rear with Lauren, directly behind Artie. After an hour of the punishing pace set by Finn’s ridiculously long stride, he was jealous of Artie for the first time in his life and wished that he had an enchanted chair that he controlled mentally because while he and everyone else was breathing hard, Artie wasn’t showing any signs of strain. Puck huffed a breath and picked up his pace, wondering why it was that they were letting Finn decide how fast they went.

 

The path leveled out eventually, and they turned a bend to face the walls of the fort. The gates were wide open, one of them lying on the ground, and the courtyard was scattered with debris like dead plants, rusted weapons and armour and overturned cobblestones. Puck and Finn pushed the doors open to the fort itself, revealing a similarly damaged main hall that extended back to an overturned dais. Smaller hallways branched off the main one, and staircases spiraled both upwards and downwards.

 

Puck looked up, letting the rest of the group get a little ahead of him. Light beamed in through what looked like they had once been wide windows on the second story. A walkway wrapped around the main hall that would have allowed people on the second floor to look down to whatever went on in the entrance hall.  _Not defensible_ , Puck thought. The windows, the entranceway being open to two stories of the building, none of it would stand up well if an invader made it past the gate.

 

“It looks sturdy.” Finn broke the hush that had fallen as everyone took in their surroundings. “No one’s been here for a while though. I wonder what damaged it like this.”

 

“The Spellplague did,” Artie said. “It hit this place hard. I can still feel it in the Weave in a couple of places.”

 

“I can’t,” Rachel said curiously. “Are you sure? The Weave feels just fine to me.”

 

“We use different threads of the Weave, Rachel. The part that bards use was barely affected at all by the Spellplague. I’m sure. It’s only echoes though, we have nothing to worry about.”

 

Artie moved through the hall, his chair rising and falling smoothly over chunks of rock. Lauren had stayed back with him, and Puck turned to her to suggest that they split up the group to cover more ground, but she was staring at Hummel. They’d been paired together for watch shifts, and he’d noticed that she tended to spend a lot of time watching him. She was badass, and it was hot, but her obsession with Kurt was really a turn-off.

 

“You know he’s into dudes, right?” he mumbled, too low for anyone but her to catch.

 

“What?” she said distractedly.

 

“Hummel. You’re not his type.”

 

She finally looked at him. “And he’s not mine, Puckerman. I prefer it when there isn’t a distinct possibility a guy’ll snap and murder me.”

 

“Yeah, well, you sure spend enough time looking at him. Could have fooled me.”

 

She rolled her eyes at him and walked away, raising her voice so the whole group would hear. “Let’s head down. Everything above ground will be ruined by the weather by now, so if we’re looking for a map, our best chance is to find rooms without windows.”

 

“Are we splitting up?” Mike asked.

 

“No,” Quinn said firmly, not giving Lauren any chance to answer. “Not until we’re as sure as we can be that this place is as abandoned as the forest.” She nudged a musty doll out of the way with her foot, its shattered porcelain face gaping at Puck creepily.

 

“I’ll go first,” Finn volunteered, heading toward the closest set of stairs and peering down. “It’s kind of dark. Did we get any torches?”

 

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said, “but I’ve got it under control.” She picked up a short piece of wood from the floor and closed other hand into a fist, whispering a few musical sounding phrases into it. When she was finished opened her hand and a bright ball of light fluttered to the top of the stick and stuck there.

 

“There,” she said proudly. Brittany applauded for a few short seconds before Santana got a hold of her hand again. “Shall we?” She looked up at Finn expectantly, who grinned back down at her, creating a sort of congratulatory loop. Puck rolled his eyes.

 

“Yes, we shall,” Quinn said finally, snapping them out of it. “Let’s go, we’re wasting daylight and the hike down will be annoying in the dark.”

 

Finn took the first steps down the stairs, clutching the rail with one hand and the hilt of his sword with the other. Rachel followed close behind, leaning forward with her glowing stick so they could see the stairs. The rest of the group began carefully picking their way down the stairs, except for Artie, who probably couldn’t trip over debris if he tried and so just followed slowly behind Tina.

 

Puck was the last one to start down the stairs. He was about to follow Lauren when he saw movement in his peripheral vision. Puck whirled about, startled, and looked over the deserted hall one more time. Something that looked like it had once been a tapestry fluttered in a gust of wind, but everything else was perfectly still.  _My imagination_ , he thought, and dismissed it, turning to hurry down the stairs before Rachel got so far ahead he had to do it blind.

 

~*~

 

Rachel lifted her glowing stick higher as she made her way along the corridor behind Finn so the light would reach everyone. She could still hear Puck cursing under his breath about the chunk of rock he’d accidentally kicked, and she hoped to avoid future incidents. The first few rooms that they’d investigated had been disappointingly empty, but Rachel had just tightened her resolve.

 

Finn turned into another room, this one through a large archway. “The big door probably means it’s important, right?” he asked. Rachel stepped through after him and froze as her light illuminated an enormous upright stone ring. Rachel had seen so many pictures of things exactly like this in her history books, and the excitement of actually seeing one nearly took her breath away. A magical portal. A grin spread across her face, despite the fact that their situation could turn deadly at any moment.

 

Brittany pushed into the room to see better, and Rachel could hear the delight in her voice when she said, “Elves!” This room was nearly untouched by time. The floor was clean, the tapestries still hung neatly on the walls, and everything seemed intact. Rachel looked to where Brittany was pointing, to a large tapestry directly behind the portal that depicted an identical portal and what were unmistakeably elves using it somehow.

 

“It’s a portal,” Artie had pushed up to right behind her elbow, and Rachel hastily moved to let everyone into the room.

 

“Well, yes, obviously. Can you use it?” If Artie could use it, they could open a portal right to Lilsholm. They wouldn’t be able to come back, since there needed to be a portal on both ends to establish a two way link, but that wouldn’t matter if they were home. Her dads would be able to fix everything.

 

“I don’t know the spell,” he admitted. “That’s way more complex than anything I know. If we could find a spell scroll to open it written down somewhere and I had some help to cast it though, yeah, I probably could.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Puck asked. “All I’m hearing is nerd, nerd, nerd.”

 

“We can use this portal to get home, genius,” Quinn explained in a condescending tone before Rachel could do so more diplomatically. “We just need to figure out how to open it.”

 

“It’s been a hundred years since the Spellplague,” Kurt said, looking up from where he was examining the join of the wall and floor to join the conversation. “That’s a long time for no one else to come this way.” He shrugged. “Anything of value is probably long gone. I don’t think that what we need is here.”

 

“And thank you, downer, for once again proving that no one is as depressing as you,” Santana snarked. Kurt looked back down at the floor, apparently tuning them out. “Fine. So we need to find what? Their library? A magic workshop?”

 

“I don’t know exactly,” Artie replied. “It would probably be with other books, so that’s a place to start at least. If we split up, we could cover more ground. Rachel, Tina, Mercedes, you all have an idea of what we’re looking for, right?”

 

“I do too,” Quinn interjected. “I actually paid attention when we learned about magical artifacts. I can take a group.”

 

“I thought you were against splitting up,” Puck said snidely, apparently still stung by Quinn’s tone. Friction in the group is inevitable, she reminded herself, Will’s voice echoing in her ears. Even if everything would be solved if everyone listened to her, she couldn’t force them to. Instead she turned around to start making groups, and noticed Kurt on his hands and knees, pressing his ear to the wall near the floor.

 

“What are you doing?” she asked. Kurt had been distant and unfocused since their escape, even more so than usual, but she hadn’t ever seen him willingly get dirty.

 

“I can hear something,” he whispered, not turning his face away from the crack. The bickering fell silent instantly. “Next room over.”

 

Finn was off like a shot, darting into the hallway. Rachel followed with the light, and she could hear a clatter as the rest of the group came along as well to stick with the light source. They swung around the door into the room, to find…nothing. The room was silent, a thick layer of undisturbed dust on the floor showing that it had been empty for a long while.

 

It had once been an armoury or something similar, judging from the collapsed wooden racks, but there was nothing of interest in there now. Rachel exchanged a worried glance with Finn. “There’s nothing here,” she announced. “The room’s empty.”

 

She turned to Kurt for an explanation. “I’m sorry,” he said after peering into the room himself and taking a deep breath. “I can feel bits and pieces of the Spellplague down here and I’m on edge. I was sure I heard something, but I could have imagined it.”

 

“Okay, so Hummel’s crazy aside, can we actually get a move on?” Puck asked. “I’m not interested in spending the rest of my life down here. Artie, you come with me and Lauren, then Quinn can take Santana and Brittany, Finn can go with Rachel, Cohen-Chang-Chang can stick together and then Mercedes can take Kurt. There, problem solved, let’s go.”

 

“We can leave our packs in the portal room, so we don’t have to carry all that weight around,” Rachel suggested. She bit her lip as another thought occurred to her. “And, um, I probably could have done this earlier, but maybe I should make some more lights?” She hadn’t even considered it, it was an honest mistake.

 

“That probably would have been nice before I broke my foot on that stupid rock, Rachel.” Puck was clearly working to keep his tone civil, and though he was failing, she appreciated the effort. “Maybe you should.”

 

“Kurt and I have making light covered between us, so we’re fine,” Mercedes said. “There was that corridor a while back, we’ll go down there to look. See you guys later.” She grasped her holy symbol in one hand, and raised the other as it began to glow. Kurt followed quietly behind her, one hand on her cloak. They dumped their packs in the portal room and quickly disappeared around a corner, the light receding as they got further away.

 

Rachel ignored the concerned whispers that sprung up around her as soon as Kurt and Mercedes' light had completely disappeared. She was not surprised that Kurt was hearing things. She'd been imagining whispers as well; it was just part of being in a dark ruin. She'd read extensively on the subject, but she didn't expect others to have such a thorough knowledge of how to recognize auditory hallucinations caused by uneasiness and ignore them.

 

She focused on lighting up three small pieces of wood from the collapsed racks, handing them to Mike, Lauren and Quinn when she was done. Everyone but her had left their packs while she cast the spells, so she took the opportunity to drop her own while they tried to figure out the best way to hold their new torches without hiding the light.

 

"Which way now?" Tina asked when Rachel returned. "Keep going and then split up when we find a branch?"

 

Finn shrugged. "I guess. This place can't be too huge. If you run into trouble, just yell." He paused, face contorting in a way that always made Rachel want to pat his cheek, and then continued quickly, "Not that I think anyone will run into trouble! We'll all be fine."

 

"That's solid leadership, Finnocence," Santana said, poisonously sweet. "Now turn around, and let's go, hopefully before Ms. Holier-than-Thou and Mr. Crazypants realize that we didn't set a meeting point before they left and come back." She walked around him, leading the way down the corridor.

 

Rachel looked over her shoulder as she followed Finn. Mercedes and Kurt would be fine. There was nothing to worry about. A shadow moved unexpectedly in the corner of her vision, and she quickly turned fully to face it, but there was still nothing there except for Lauren and Puck, taking their habitual position at the rear of the group. She knew that she hadn’t really seen anything. It was, after all, completely normal for one's imagination to act up in a dark, unfamiliar environment.

 

"Is there a problem?" Lauren asked when Rachel stayed turned around for a moment longer, just to be sure.

 

"No, no, I just...I thought I saw something, but my mind was playing tricks on me. It's fine," she said dismissively.

 

"Okay," Lauren said dubiously. "If you say so."

 

Rachel forced the shadow out of her mind as she hopped over a piece of rubble to catch up to Finn. Imagining things would just make the entire venture down here much worse, and if she wanted to make a career of adventuring she'd be going into a lot more dark and scary places over her lifetime. She had to calm down.

 

Behind them, the shadow moved again.

 

~*~

 

Lauren held the glowing chunk of wood (she was not calling it a torch, no matter how loudly Berry had insisted it was) out in front of her as she led Puckerman and Artie into yet another room. They'd left the others behind all of maybe twenty minutes ago, and she was bored out of her skull already.

 

All of the rooms were the same, and all of them were empty. They'd found a bedroom wing apparently, and judging by the ancient remains of campfires that they came across occasionally it looked like someone actually had been there since the Spellplague.

 

The guilt that had been chasing her around all week nipped at her. She hadn’t told anyone what Kurt had said about Lilsholm. She had meant to, but then the sun had risen and there had been no familiar landmarks and she hadn’t wanted to add to the shit pile. She had told herself that they were so far away that it could wait, and besides, Hummel was pretty far from trustworthy, in her opinion. What if he’d been lying, trying to keep her from digging deeper? He’d certainly actively avoided being in her presence alone since their conversation in the wagon, and it wasn’t helping her suspicions about him.

 

She pressed her lips together. The others had to know. If it was true, it couldn’t come as a surprise. She would tell them before they left the fort what Hummel had told her, and hopefully enough of the others would have noticed there was something up with him to believe her even if he said she was lying.

 

She’d been watching him, and it hadn’t exactly made her feel better about spending time with him. It was possible that part of it was that she was finding it hard to trust someone who had been recently dominated as thoroughly as he must have been by Sorin, but Hummel looked sick with…something. He seemed tired and sad, and he spent a lot of time staring off into space like he was thinking about something. And sure he could really be that affected by seeing Lilsholm burn or be suffering aftereffects of his mind being made into a plaything, but Lauren hadn’t been brought up to trust the easy explanation, and the way he had acted made her worry, though not for him. He was the weak link of their group, and that made him dangerous, even if he was innocent.

 

If he deteriorated much further she was going to report him to Mercedes, at the very least. If home really was gone, she was stuck with this group for a while, and it not falling apart under pressure was kind of important. Mercedes wasn’t an idiot though, she must have noticed already that something wasn’t right and Lauren would just be confirming suspicions. Even if she and Hummel were best friends, Mercedes would be able to see the risks of having someone so unstable around if Lauren approached her to ask her to do something about it diplomatically enough.

 

Lauren led the way into yet another bedroom, the furniture wrecked and scattered. She spotted a slip of paper sitting alone on a shelf that was just barely attached to the wall, and carefully stepped over the debris to pick it up. She held the light closer to it to read the spidery lettering, but it was completely unreadable.

 

“Can either of you read this?” she asked, waving the scrap in Artie’s general direction. “I don’t even recognize the language.”

 

Artie rolled over and took it from her hand. Lauren leaned in with the light, and Artie squinted at the paper in confusion. “It looks like gibberish to me. Maybe a code or- Holy shit!”

 

The ink had swirled and reformed on the page to read, very clearly and in Common, “ _you are going to regret coming here_.”

 

“What?” Puck asked, coming across the room from where he’d be examining a bureau. “What happened?”

 

Lauren took the paper from Artie and gave it to Puck, who flinched when he read it, but quickly rolled his shoulders and smirked at her. “Wait, you couldn’t read this? Really? Even my little sister can read my grandpa’s writing, and that’s a lot worse than this.”

 

“It changed while we were looking at it, Puckerman. It’s not the last people who were through here playing a practical joke on whoever came after them. It’s a threat.” Lauren snagged the paper back from him and looked at it again. “And it’s gone.” The paper had changed again, back to the original unreadable junk.

 

“Can we start going a little faster?” Artie asked uneasily. “That’s creepy as all get out and I would really like to get out of here.”

 

Lauren slipped the paper into a small pouch at her waist. "Yeah," she said, unable to ignore her growing uneasiness. "Let's go faster. The sooner we're out of here, the happier I'll be."

 

She gave one last look around the room and followed Artie through the doorway.

 

~*~

 

Rachel led the way deeper into the fort, her light casting shadows in the scattered debris. Finn followed quietly, keeping one hand on her cloak so she knew he was there. Neither of them spoke, and the silence was becoming oppressive.

 

"We haven't seen any sort of room in a while," Finn whispered. "How long do you think this hall goes?"

 

"I have no idea, Finn," Rachel replied quietly. "But it must be leading somewhere important. Whoever built it wouldn't have made it so long for no reason." She heard the slight ring of metal on metal of Finn's chainmail as he shrugged, and they let the conversation drop.

 

They'd left Mike and Tina first when the main corridor had branched off into two, and then Puck, Lauren and Artie had taken the next one. The quiet had been even heavier when Quinn had stepped up to walk beside Rachel, and she'd been an odd combination of apprehensive and relieved as she'd watched the bobbing light Santana held disappear down the last branch of tunnel they'd come to. And then they'd been alone, and they hadn't seen another doorway, another corridor, nothing, for the entire time they'd been walking.

 

"I think we should turn around," Finn said after a few more minutes of walking. "This might be an escape tunnel or something. Or what if it's actually a volcano and we get burned to death? That would suck."

 

"The odds of that are ridiculously low," Rachel scoffed. "It's much more likely that we'll find something like a magic workshop so if something went wrong the rest of the fort wouldn't go up in a magical conflagration. We’ll find a spellscroll for that portal, it’s almost certain." She turned around just in time to catch him mouthing 'conflagration', and said, "Like an explosion, Finn."

 

"Oh!" he said. "That makes more sense. I thought we were going to a church for a minute."

 

"That's congregation," Rachel said distractedly. "Do you hear something?" A low buzzing was beginning to press on her temples, and the light seemed to be getting dimmer.

 

Finn let go of her cloak and didn't respond. "Finn?"

 

Rachel whirled around, her free hand on the hilt of her sword. The corridor was empty. "Finn?!" she called louder, drawing her sword. It didn't make any sense. There were no doors, no branching tunnels, there was nowhere for him to have gone but he was gone.

 

Rachel slowly circled again, getting her back against the wall and holding the tip of her sword low and ready. "Show yourself!" she said sharply. "I'm not afraid of you!"

 

The light went out. She didn't get the chance to scream.

 

~*~

 

Quinn suppressed a sigh of frustration as she, Santana and Brittany methodically combed through yet another room that turned out to be empty.

 

"This place is really big," Brittany observed. "I wonder if there's a dragon in here. Lord Tubbington always said that dragons lived in big places."

 

Quinn stole a glance at Brittany as she overturned a heap of fabric. She was dreamily sifting through the contents of a cupboard, completely serious about her cat telling her about dragons. Quinn elected to not respond.

 

"I think it's probably too narrow for a dragon down here, Britt," Santana said. "This room's empty. Let's keep going."

 

"Fine," Quinn said, leading the way out of the room. Her breath was coming shorter the longer they stayed down there, and continuing to move would be the best way to hide that from the other two. Her claustrophobia was the last thing she needed Santana to find out about. So what if it was oppressively dark and small down here? There was nothing to be scared of.

 

Quinn stiffened as a tiny gust of air wafted over her neck, rustling her ponytail, and the smell of rotted flesh was carried with it. "Something's here," she said, forcing calmness into her voice. Santana and Brittany reacted fast, moving into a defensive formation and readying weapons. Santana reached for her bow first, but looked at the tight quarters and reconsidered, loosening her sword in its sheath instead.

 

Quinn spun around when something brushed against her neck, drawing her sword in a smooth motion. She paused, confused, when she was confronted with empty air, but a second later she realized that there were any number of invisible creatures and invisibility spells as she berated herself silently for hesitating.

 

She slashed the air in front of her, but met no resistance. Santana gasped quietly and whirled at the same instant, stabbing into nothing.

 

"It touched me," Quinn reported, tightening her grip on her sword's hilt to stop her hand from shaking.

 

Santana nodded quickly. "Me too. Can't see or hear it though. Brittany?"

 

Brittany shook her head, uncharacteristically solemn. "I don't know. It feels bad here."

 

Quinn shivered, eying the stone walls. "We should head back to the others. Splitting up was stupid."

 

Just as she started easing her way back to where they'd left the others, a tiny moan came drifting up the corridor. Quinn spun toward the source of the sound, squinting into the darkness.

 

"That sounded like a person," Brittany said uncomprehendingly. "We should go see."

 

"No, no we shouldn't," Santana said, talking quickly to hide her obvious alarm. "No one we know was ahead of us, and I don't want to meet the person who hangs out in an abandoned tunnel."

 

"We don't know that the corridors don't connect," Quinn said slowly, wishing that she could just agree and let them try to escape. She could feel an oppressive presence, but she didn’t know if it was her imagination or something real. "It wouldn't make sense if they didn't. That could be one of us. We need to make sure." She forced herself to take a step further away from what she hoped would be safety, dragging her foot along the rough rock that formed the floor.

 

Santana looked like she wanted to argue more, but cut herself off, a horrified expression sliding across her face. Quinn looked down, and nearly shrieked in surprise at the snake-like things writhing silently at their feet. She couldn’t see where they had come from, and they were so long that their bodies extended deeper into the gloom than the small light Santana held illuminated.

 

One bent itself off the ground, sliding up higher and higher until the blunted end was hovering in the air at Quinn's eye level. It really did look like a snake, except Quinn had never seen a snake without a face, or one so long. She edged away, staring at it fixedly. The way it swayed was both mesmerizing and terrifying.

 

“Santana?” Brittany whimpered. Quinn risked a glance away from the upright... _thing_  to look at Brittany. Two more of them were pushing off the ground to stand up straight, curving in towards Brittany slightly, but were otherwise passive.

 

They had no faces, Quinn thought again, a little hysterically. They weren't snakes. A rustling came from the darkness behind that the things had emerged from, and Quinn realized with horror that they ran parallel to each other and were evenly spaced, that they were appendages of what sounded like a much larger creature. She ran through every monster she had ever been told about, but she was losing her focus as the walls grew tighter and the tentacle gently waved at her and she  _couldn’t think_.

 

A moan came from the inky darkness again, deeper and louder than the first. Quinn used all the discipline she had ever learned to jerk herself out of her panic and muttered, "On sound." Brittany and Santana both clicked their tongues in acknowledgement, and Quinn counted ten pulses of her racing heartbeat before quietly saying, "Go!" and exploding into action.

 

She swung her sword with all her power viciously fast at the tentacle slowly swaying in front of here. She connected easily, but it was like attacking a hardwood post. The thing had no give to it at all, and she nearly dropped her sword as it bit into the skin of the tentacle only slightly and then stuck there.

 

Quinn wrenched her sword out of the thing’s hide and jumped backwards, only to take a surprising hit to her back that knocked her forward hard. She arrested her stumble, turning it into a leap sideways just as the tentacle that had been in front of her punched forward. It barely grazed her arm, but the force behind it made her stomach drop. One hit from this thing could take her down easily.

 

Brittany and Santana weren’t doing any better or worse than she was. They’d managed to avoid any major blows and Quinn took a deep breath to order them to retreat and regroup. She had barely opened her mouth when a hand brushed against her back. A cold sensation rushed out from the point of contact and her muscles were stiffening suddenly, freezing her in place. Her sword was plucked from her nerveless fingers and she was held up from behind by somebody as the tentacle she’d attacked slid along the floor to her and up her leg, wrapping itself firmly around her waist.

 

“Let go of her!” Santana shouted, her face contorted with fear and anger. “Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you!” She barely managed to duck as a tentacle swung at her, somersaulting away from it and coming back up smoothly. Brittany fended off another one at her back, eyes wide and obviously terrified.

 

 _It’s playing with them_ , Quinn thought, barely lucid through her fear as the tentacle rolled and coiled itself around her, pinning her arms to her sides and pushing her legs apart to slide between them. The person behind her had let go, and she was suddenly hoisted off her feet and pulled toward the body of the monster, out of the light cast by the little ball of magic that Santana still held in her off hand.

 

She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t turn her head, she couldn’t move her body, she couldn’t even cry for help. And then it was coiling up around her neck, and all she could hear was her blood pounding in her ears.

 

~*~

 

Tina clutched at Mike’s arm hard, and he reciprocated as they stared out past the magical shield covering the doorway. The monster that they had barely escaped rubbed one long, thick tentacle along the shield, retracting it lazily when the shield buzzed loudly but didn’t give.

 

All Tina could see of it in the shadows outside the room was that it was enormous, and that it had several apparently retractable tentacles. It was vaguely humanoid in shape, but horribly deformed, and Tina was grateful for the darkness because she didn’t want to see it.

 

They had found the room after half an hour of searching. Well, maybe half an hour. It was difficult to measure time down there, but Tina had a decent internal clock. It had been in pristine condition, like the wizards that had once used it as a workshop had just stepped out for a moment rather than died a presumably gruesome death when the Spellplague hit the fort. There must have been some pretty strong protective wards up to keep the room in such good condition. Tina could read the arcane language of magic passably well, and it hadn’t taken her long to locate a scroll that seemed like it would open the portal. She had tucked it, and several others, into her pouches, but they’d left the rest of the room’s contents where they were. It was possible that moving the wrong thing would set off a magical trap, and she was not interested in losing a hand.

 

She’d noticed the trap on the doorway as they were leaving, the slightly glistening letters etched into the stone indicating that it would seal the door, and now, after a panicked run back after it had become obvious that their swords could not hurt that monster, Tina wondered if it was a trap or a safeguard. They couldn’t get out, but that thing couldn’t get in, and she could see the runes to dispel the shield on their side of it.

 

It was only minutes before the creature moved away, but it felt like hours. Tina wiped at the tears drying on her face, and shakily detached her fingers from Mike’s forearm.

 

“What was that? Have you ever even heard of something like that?” Mike’s face was pale in the light of the glowing rock Rachel had enchanted, and he had a few stray tears to wipe at as well.

 

“No,” Tina said in a weak voice. She clamped her lips together to stop the trembling of her chin and continued more strongly, “No, I have no idea what that thing was. I think we need to find the others and get back to the portal room. That thing moves slowly, we know we can outrun it, and we have the scroll we need. We just need to move fast and hope there’s only one of it.”

 

Mike looked at her dubiously, but didn’t disagree. He would have if he had a better idea, so Tina turned to the doorway. “Can you get us out of here? I don’t know much about things like this.” Mike said, leaning over her shoulder.

 

“Probably?” Tina said. “When I triggered it, I was mostly thinking about putting something between it and us. I think I can dispel it though.”

 

She knelt down to examine the runes closer, passing her hand over them cautiously. The shield dissipated immediately with a tiny crackle, to her surprise. “I guess it wasn’t a trap at all,” she observed out loud. “It was for keeping things out, not in.”

 

Mike leaned out into the passageway, gripping the handle of his sword tightly like he thought it protect him. He must know it wouldn’t though, from the way it had failed to penetrate the tough skin of the tentacles as they struck at the two of them. Tina had a white-knuckle grip on her own sword as well that she couldn’t seem to relax, so she was not judging him.

 

They ventured out into the darkness.

 

~*~

 

Kurt followed Mercedes down the wide but short corridor, guided by the light glowing from her hands. He thought that Finn would probably have to duck to fit down it now, and wondered vaguely about the safety of heading into a rock tunnel that seemed to be getting shorter by the yard.

 

It didn’t feel any worse than the rest of the fort had when he touched his magic though, so it likely didn’t matter. The foreboding feeling had started tickling at the back of his mind before they had even noticed the fort, and it had only gotten worse as they drew closer. When Artie had said that he could feel the Spellplague, Kurt had decided that his fear was a result of the corrupted magic inside him and the corrupted magic of the environment interacting and kept his mouth shut. No one needed any more reminders of what he was, what he could do to people. They’d be getting those anyway if he ever managed find the words to tell them what he had done-

 

No. It hadn’t been him. It wasn’t his fault, and if he kept telling himself that maybe he’d believe it. He was haunted by the memory of how much he had  _wanted_  to obey when she had ordered him, by the smell, by the sensation of hot blood pumping over his cold hands-

 

Kurt tripped over something and barked his shin hard against an outcropping of rock. He bit down on his lip to keep quiet, but only succeeded in putting the familiar taste of blood in his mouth along with the grunt of pain.

 

Mercedes grabbed his arm, holding him upright. “What happened? You okay?”

 

Kurt unlocked his jaw enough to choke out, “I’m fine, I don’t know what happened, I was kind of lost in thought and I tripped on something.” He took deep breaths, focusing on the pain in his leg. It faded quickly enough, and he disentangled his arm from Mercedes’ grip to stand upright again. He took a step forward, but Mercedes didn’t follow. He turned back around to face her.

 

“What were you thinking about?” Mercedes asked in a deceptively calm tone as she leaned toward him in a subtly demanding way. She was apparently still stuck on their short conversation from that morning, but Kurt couldn’t really blame her. He knew that he’d been doing a poor job of faking normalcy, and he’d never been much of a liar.

 

“Nothing important, just trying to figure out how this place is laid out. It’s kind of odd, right?” He forced a quick smile and hoped that she would accept the change of subject, but apparently Mercedes was done accepting what he said at face value and she was already shaking her head before he finished talking.

 

“Kurt, you need to stop lying. You’re not good at it. I catch you staring off into space looking like you’re trying not to cry, and every time I wake up at night I can tell that you’re awake but you’re always trying to pretend you aren’t. I know something happened to you that you aren’t telling us, and I’m trusting that you had a good reason for trying to hide whatever it is, but now you need to trust me. You told Lauren something, but you’ve been keeping it yourselves and she doesn’t know you like I do. You aren’t dealing, and I just want to help. You can tell me anything, just, please, Kurt don’t keep doing this to yourself.” She reached out and grabbed his hand in hers, squeezing gently.

 

Kurt felt like all of the blood in his body was pooled in his feet. He’d known that the moment was coming, that Mercedes wouldn’t just let him go like he’d hoped. The only thing that had kept him from slinking off in the night to find a cliff was that Mercedes would have been the one to come looking for him. He couldn’t hurt any more people that he loved. Or let them be hurt, and Sorin would come after them whether he was there or not.

 

He’d been standing there silently for too long, but Mercedes just looked at him, sincere concern in her eyes. She loved him, he knew she did, and he loved her back. She’d been the first person their age to really reach out to him, and she’d been as lonely as him before they’d joined New Directions and started spending all their spare time together. After this though, she wouldn’t even be able to look at him anymore.

 

She would find out eventually, they all would. All he had left was some sort of control over when, but even that was running out. If they could open that portal, it would all be over, and he made his decision and was talking before he was consciously aware of it. “I was in the shop working on Finn’s chainmail.” His throat constricted with sudden tears, forcing his voice up into a high pitched rasp. “She came in and told me she’d been looking for me, and then I couldn’t think. She made me tired, made me think that she’d look after me and I should just let go, and I  _did_.” Words failed him at that, so instead he clenched his free hand into a fist tightly enough that he could feel his pulse pounding, trying to regain enough control to continue calmly.

 

“Kurt, you can’t be mad at yourself for that, she did it to all of us. She’s so strong, there wasn’t anything you could’ve done.” Mercedes’ whisper was meant to be soothing, probably, but it was the last straw to his tattered composure.

 

“You don’t understand.” His voice was rising, high and hysterical, and Mercedes was staring at him wide eyed but he couldn’t stop or he would never be able to say it. “She made me want to. She made me  _want_  to, oh gods, I wish she had just killed me instead of making me like it, I keep seeing it again and again and she made it so you would  _hate_ me if I told you so I couldn’t, I lied to Lauren, she doesn’t know-”

 

He was abruptly muffled by Mercedes tugging him down and pressing his face into her shoulder. He let out a long jittery breath that turned into a sob, grabbing desperately for a handhold in Mercedes’ cloak. They stood there for a long moment without speaking, Kurt choking on each exhale and Mercedes holding him in place firmly.

 

“I will  _never_  hate you,” Mercedes said finally, her voice shaky with emotion. “Whatever she did to you, whatever she made you do, I will never hate you for it. It wasn’t your fault.”

 

“You will for this. I hate myself for it, I won’t blame you.” Mercedes let out a tiny, hurt sound, but Kurt kept going, spilling everything that he had tried to keep bottled up. He felt gray and hollowed out, the only thing left inside him a pounding, desperate  _need_  for honesty. “When she had all you guys unconscious and tied up she took me back into town.” Kurt closed his eyes, allowing Mercedes to hold him close for just a moment longer and breathing deep to try and relieve the throbbing in his head.

 

“Kurt, I-”

 

“Hello!”

 

Kurt reacted slower than he should’ve, extracting himself from Mercedes’ grip and turning around to face the source of the pleased-sounding greeting. Mercedes lifted her hand and renewed the light that she had allowed to dim, revealing a tall, middle-aged man smiling slightly at them in a way that scratched at Kurt’s already constantly frayed nerves. The feeling of wrongness skittered down his spine when his magic responded to  _something_  and surged in intensity. He felt the familiar faint burn on his back as the magic concentrated in his spellscar like he was casting a spell, and the sensation of his magic acting against his will was so horribly familiar after Sorin that he had to lock his knees to keep from collapsing.

 

Kurt couldn’t look away from him, trying to process being smiled at by a man who had some sort of effect on the magic in him and who had appeared out of nowhere. There had been nothing but silent, empty space seconds before, and he had been distracted, but it still didn’t make sense. The fear he felt was fogging his mind, he couldn’t focus. The man cocked his head to the side quizzically and smiled wider when neither of them responded to his greeting.

 

“Now, what are two little babies like you doing down here?” he asked, putting hand on his hip and waggling a finger at them. “I’ve met most of the rest of you now, but honestly I’m mostly interested in you two, especially after that conversation you were just having. So dramatic!” His smile disappeared, replaced by a contemplative look. “You’ll make excellent leads for my project. The hero, brave and loyal, a true cleric, and her companion, barely human and keeping secrets. I’m very excited to see how this plays out! Act One has already been a huge success for me, I was very amused by the way you kept convincing yourselves you were alone, but I think that Act Two will be even better after I get it all set up. I’m sure that you two will be just as interesting when I separate you.” He smiled at them like he was expecting praise, a dangerous edge to his expression.

 

Kurt reached down into himself, grabbing at his magic. He had recognized that Kurt was different, almost immediately, and a horrible suspicion about what they were facing began to dawn on him. He was not going to allow them to be separated, especially if he was right. Mercedes was speaking under her breath as she recited what Kurt recognized as a protection spell. The man’s attention snapped fully to her, and he said, “I don’t think you should do that.”

 

Kurt felt a press of magic that he couldn’t see or hear as a burst of magical force hit Mercedes. She stammered and stalled on her recitation, her breath suddenly coming faster and harder and her light snuffing out, pitching the corridor into darkness except for the faint glow that came hand-in-hand with Kurt’s magic. He reached out blindly for Mercedes, gripping a handful of her cloak and pushing magic out of himself at the same time, casting a bright blue glow that danced eerily over the walls and floor.

 

The man was gone. Kurt looked around wildly, but he and Mercedes were alone in his circle of light. He swallowed hard and wiped the drying tears from his face. The need to confess pushed at him, but it wasn’t the time. They had to stay alert, or they would be easy targets. “Are you okay?”

 

She let her breath out shakily. “Yeah, fine. I think. Let’s go and...let’s go and find the others. Fast.”

 

Kurt led the way back up the corridor, scanning the indistinct shadows as they went in the hopes that the man would not be able to sneak up on them again. Mercedes walked backward to watch their backs more effectively, and they made it back to the portal room without incident, somehow.

 

Mercedes cast her light spell again, dimly supplementing the light that he was giving off, and Kurt let go of his magic, the glow receding back into his skin. “What did he hit you with?” he asked quietly.

 

“I don’t know, but it felt like it had a divine source,” she said with a furrowed brow. “I think he was a cleric, but there was something _wrong_  about his spell, I can’t explain it but it gave me an awful feeling.”

 

Kurt’s breath caught in his throat. “I think he’s an abomination,” he said quickly, trying to get the words out. “A real one. I’ve never seen one besides me, but I think he was. He recognized what I am, and I could feel something.” His hands were shaking, but that was nothing new. He had been trembling off and on since Sorin had first loosened her grip on him enough to let him realize exactly what he had done. What was new was the horror that was washing over him at the thought of another thing that carried the Spellplague inside itself, older and more experienced and not scared to use its power. Kurt knew very well what his body could do to people after Sorin, and the thought of facing something with less scruples and more power was terrifying.

 

Kurt had just regained some modicum of control over himself when a rustling, slithering sound drifted up the passageway from the direction that the rest of the group had presumably taken when they split up, getting steadily louder and accompanied by a dizzying awful smell of rot. He opened his palms and pulled his magic to the surface in preparation, pushing everything that wouldn’t help in a battle from his mind. Mercedes shifted her grip on her mace, and they waited, breath coming short with fear and the sounds of debris shifting becoming louder as whatever it was moved closer.

 

“Oh, you two. So cute and determined! I’ll be looking forward to how you deal with what comes next!” It was the same man speaking, but his voice echoed around the tunnel, making it impossible to tell where he was.

 

Kurt began casting a spell, expecting someone or something to materialize from the shadows for him to aim it at. He had nearly finished it when something grotesquely strong and flexible wrapped around his waist and lifted him off his feet with a jolt, ripping him from the circle of light cast by Mercedes so fast that his head whipped backwards.

 

“Kurt!” he heard Mercedes scream, but all outside sound was cut off suddenly by another tentacle (and oh gods they were tentacles what was this thing) wrapping around his head and neck and constricting. It was cold, but pulsed horrifyingly as it flexed and wrapped around him tighter, the one around his waist only getting tighter as he struggled. It squeezed his torso tightly one last time before it relaxed and began to move, wrapping around him again and again.

 

His arms were still free though, and he had somehow kept control of his spell. He aimed the jet of cold that he had created where he thought the tentacle extended away from him and back to its owner. Kurt heard a crackle as it connected with flesh and froze it, but the creature’s barely audible hiss of pain lacked any sense of triumph for him when the pain failed to force the coils to loosen.

 

The world was exploding into stars and colours as it squeezed his throat and skull with crushing force. What little air he could drag in through his constricted windpipe wasn’t nearly enough and the tentacle wrapped around his torso kept his lungs from expanding, squeezing tighter every time he exhaled. His tiny, desperate breaths grew shorter and rasped in his ears as his brain fuzzed from lack of oxygen, and numbness spread in his limbs. The creature took advantage of his growing weakness to nudge his legs apart and loop its tentacle between them, rubbing against his inner thigh and tightening its grip again as everything faded away.

  
  
~*~

 

They’d reached a dead end and turned around, and they had just been passing the room they’d found the enchanted paper when she heard it. A woman’s scream, the words unintelligible, echoed down the passageway. Lauren smoothly increased her pace to a careful run, avoiding debris. She recognized Mercedes’ voice, and swore at herself for letting someone that Hummel could easily take down if he had the benefit of surprise go off with him by herself. She’d  _known_  that there was something wrong with him and she hadn’t stopped them.

 

Puckerman ran beside her, Artie jolting along behind them. “That was Mercedes,” Artie said, sounded shocked. “There’s nothing down here though, it’s completely empty!”

 

“Are you an idiot?” she snapped. “We brought the threat with us. Have you not noticed that Hummel’s completely insane?”

 

She didn’t look back at Artie, concentrating on not tripping on the uneven ground. The anger in his voice when he replied was hard to miss though. “Kurt would  _never_  hurt any of us. Don’t talk about him like that.”

 

“He’s been lying to all of you,” Lauren snapped as they rounded a corner. “And I’m sure he only told me part of the story when I confronted him, and he only said anything at all because I threatened him with telling everyone how fucked up he is. I don’t care what he would or wouldn’t have done before. Something happened to him, and he’s different. I barely know him and I can see it. You can’t just blindly trust people like this.”

 

“Well, what do you know then, since you’re so bent on  _enlightening_  us? What’s he been lying about? He barely talks anymore!” Artie was getting loud in his anger, but Lauren wasn’t going to back down. If Mercedes was dead and Hummel had done it, it was on her.

 

“It was a lie of omission, and I only didn’t tell you because what if he denied it? Which one of us would you believe? Lilsholm's gone. Burned to the ground. And Hummel watched it happen."

 

She was suddenly by herself, both Puckerman and Artie having jerked to a stop in shock. She turned around and snapped at them, "No. This is not the time. Have you forgotten about your friend that’s in danger, or is something that you can’t possibly change more important?”

 

“Fuck,” Puck swore loudly. Artie’s face was distinctly greenish with what looked like a sudden case of nausea, and he’d shut up immediately. Lauren wasn’t taking any satisfaction from that, though. Saying what Kurt had told her brought back a storm of memories of home, and to cover the resurgence of her grief she turned and started running in the direction Mercedes and Hummel had gone off in. The light followed her after a second’s delay, so she knew that at least Artie was following.

 

She listened over the sounds of breathing and hard footfalls for any proof that Mercedes was still alive, that she hadn’t failed at keeping intact one band of hopeless losers, but she couldn’t hear anything. They reached the portal room again and stopped to find their bearings.

 

“Mercedes?” she called. “Can you hear me?” There was a tiny moan from inside the room, and she nodded at Puck, who pulled his waraxe off his back and stepped through the doorway. He dropped his axe with a clatter almost immediately.

 

“Shit, shit, shit, Artie, get that light in here. She’s hurt.” Lauren followed Artie in, then stood guard at the door, stealing glances at Puck, hunched over Mercedes.

 

He gently rolled her off of her front, pressing his fingers to her throat to check for a pulse. There was blood all down her face, like she’d been slammed hard into something, and there was a cut on her forehead surrounded by bruising that supported that idea. Besides that though, she seemed unharmed, but their sole cleric having a debilitating head injury was one of the worst possible scenarios. With almost anything else, she could have healed herself already. Now all they could do was hope that she would get enough of her wits together to be able to do it.

 

“This wasn’t Kurt,” Artie said firmly.

 

“No,” Puckerman agreed. “I’d be willing to bet that if he got into a wrestling match with Mercedes she’d lay him flat. If it had been him, she’d be burned or stabbed or something, not look like she got thrown into a wall. This was something else.”

 

A faint light was gleaming around a corner further down the corridor. “Company,” Lauren whispered under her breath. “Hide the light.”

 

Artie flipped his cloak over the light, casting them into darkness. There was a breathless few moments as they waited for the source of the light to get closer, and she heard a quiet scrape behind her as Puck retrieved his axe.

 

Mike and Tina came around the corner silently and nearly on top of each other, they had pulled each other so close. The light barely touched their faces, but they both looked terrified.

 

Puck took the light from Artie and stepped through the doorway. “Guys, in here,” he called quietly. “C’mon.”

 

They sped up until they were basically running, and crowded the doorway as they pushed in and collapsed to the ground with relieved but teary sounding sighs.

 

Tina noticed Mercedes first, opening her eyes after a long moment of keeping them squeezed shut. Lauren thought that she and Mike probably knew more about what was happening than she did, judging from the look of naked fear on Mike’s far as he did a headcount and came up very short. “Mercedes?” she gasped, not bothering to get up in her haste to check on her, crawling across the floor. She checked her pulse, and then shut her eyes like she was afraid of the answer to ask, “Where’s Kurt?”

 

“We don’t know,” Artie said quietly. “We heard her scream, and when we got here, she was like this and Kurt was gone.” He still looked sick, Lauren noticed, but the immediate threat of an unknown danger was presumably helping to keep his mind off of home. Lauren was almost jealous. She’d found out, and it had been immediately followed by a week with nothing to do but think about her family dying horribly.

 

“There’s something here,” Tina said quietly, stroking a hand carefully over Mercedes’ hair. “I’ve- I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere.”

 

There was a pause while everyone processed that. They’d all had extensive schooling on classification of the various creatures they could run across, and they’d of course seen many of them on guard patrol at home. Lauren knew for a fact the Tina knew a lot about monsters, she’d always gotten marks near the top of their age group. “Well, can you describe it at all?” Artie asked. “I’ve read a lot of books, maybe I’ve come across something like it somewhere.”

 

“Well, it’s an enormous monster, probably ten feet tall, and thick, like a scaled up Azimio. It moves slow, and walks on two legs. It also has at least nine retractable tentacles coming out of its back that it tried to use to kill us.” Mike spoke quickly, hands clenched into fists but still trembling. “It’s not hard to dodge its attacks, but it didn’t matter because our swords couldn’t hurt it at all. It’s tough. Does that sound familiar?”

 

Artie tilted his head to the side and thought for a second. “No,” he admitted. “I’ve never heard of anything quite like that. Maybe it’s a construct of some kind?”

 

Lauren shrugged. She didn’t know that much about magical monsters, other than abominations. Mercedes stirred at that moment though, distracting them from any further contemplation.

 

“Mercedes?” Tina said tentatively, leaning over her. “Can you hear me?”

 

She was answered by Mercedes bringing her hands up slowly and mumbling the first phrase of a healing spell. She fumbled a few times, but fortunately the gods tended to be forgiving of minor errors in spells in a way that the Weave was not, judging from how many times Lauren had seen a wizard fumble a spell versus how many times clerics did.

 

She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling for a long moment before sitting up with a groan and Tina’s assistance. She scanned the room quickly, and her moderately hopeful expression slid off her face. “Kurt?” she said pleadingly. “Is he okay?” Tina bit her lip instead of answering, and Mercedes’ eyes widened with horror. “Is he-”

 

“We don’t know,” Puck said interrupted. “We heard you scream and everything was over by the time we found you. What the hell happened?”

 

Mercedes buried her face in her hands and let out a long, shaky breath. “There was a man,” she said, half-muffled by her hands. “Kurt and I were looking around and we ran into him. He said some stuff, it was weird, like he thought we were in a play for his amusement, and then he just disappeared. I think he’s a cleric of some kind, his magic just felt that way, and Kurt said that he thought he was an abomination.  We came back here, and we heard a sound, like something big was coming up the tunnel, and…” she trailed off and pressed harder at her cheeks, trying to keep from sobbing, Lauren thought.

 

Tina wrapped her arms around Mercedes tightly. After a pause while she collected herself, Mercedes continued. “And then we heard that man again, he said we were ‘cute’, like he was so amused by us trying to get away. And then this  _thing_ , this awful thing, Kurt was casting a spell, and it grabbed him and it squeezed him until he stopped moving, and I was trying to get to him, I swear I was, but it had  _tentacles_ , I swear it did, and it threw me against the wall, and I don’t remember anything after that.”

 

They all paused to let that sink in for a moment. Tina broke the silence to ask, “It looked awful, right? Like a big person, but not shaped right? Mike and I ran into something like that.”

 

Mercedes nodded slowly, like she was still having trouble accepting the fact that an impossible creature had made off with her best friend. “Yeah,” she whispered. “It stayed out of the range of my light and pulled Kurt to it, but while he was still conscious and trying to cast magic I could sort of see it. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” She shuddered.

 

“What are we supposed to do know?” Artie asked. “That monster’s got Kurt somewhere for sure, and if it was the same thing that attacked him and Mercedes  _and_ Mike and Tina, it could just have easily gone after the others. That’s half of us, just gone, and we didn’t even manage to find that stupid scroll.”

 

“No, wait, Mike and I did find a scroll, I’ve got it,” said Tina, brightening slightly before drooping again. “If we can find the others, we can get out of here.” She hurriedly extracted a rolled up sheet from a pouch on her belt, and handed it over to Artie. He unrolled it, holding it close to his light and studying it closely.

 

“This looks like it’s right, but it’s a two person thing, and we both need to know how to use the Weave. I’d need Rachel’s help, or Tina, I guess you could try if she can’t, but it’s got a limited duration anyway, so we need to get everyone back together before I can even try.”

 

Lauren nodded. “Right, okay, here’s what we’ll do. No more splitting up, and-”

 

“Well, hello again! I didn’t expect there to be so many of you still!” A man stood in the middle of the room, in front of the portal, and waved his fingers at them as Tina, Mike and Mercedes leapt to their feet and faced him. Lauren’s pulse raced in shock, and she had nearly reached up to pull her hammer off her back before she arrested the motion and slowly relaxed her arm back to her side. There was an oppressive weight to the air of the room that made her feel like attacking right off the bat would not have been the best idea and Lauren wanted some answers before she smashed his face in anyway.

 

“Hmm, specifically, I wasn’t really expecting you two to still be kicking around,” he said, gesturing to Mike and Tina. “Excellent work though, you must be really fast runners.”

 

“Where’s Kurt?” Mercedes snapped. “And the rest of our group?”

 

“Jumping to conclusions much? For all you know, the rest of your friends met up, rescued your other friend from my pet and are making their way back to you right now. It’s possible that they’re perfectly fine.” He frowned at them reprovingly as the feeling of _wrongness_  in the room spiked, and Lauren felt a tiny jolt of fear despite herself.

 

“Are they, though?” Lauren asked, carefully keeping her voice calm. Panic would not help. “I kind of doubt it.”

 

“Well, no, of course not. I’ve been down here for a while, and I’ve been quite lonely from time to time. I even made my own pets to keep me company, but they’re frightfully boring. Useful, though. For lots of things.” He smiled at them lasciviously, and Lauren’s lip curled in disgust at the implication. He stared off into space for a moment before shaking himself. “Oh, right, I was explaining. So I get bored and lonely, and I’ve been planning what I would do when someone came down here for a very long time now. The main plot is this: I’m the villain who captured your friends, and you’re the brave heroes who are going to rescue them despite not knowing how much of them will be left by the time you do. Well, you’re going to try to rescue them. You probably won’t succeed.” His smile twisted cruelly, and he abruptly disappeared, his voice lingering after him. “Okay, that’s all, try to enjoy yourselves! Remember that you’re on an  _adventure_ , brave heroes, and try to keep your chins up!”

 

They stood there shocked for a moment, stunned speechless. Artie recovered first, “I  _told_  you that Kurt wouldn’t hurt any of us.”

 

“Look, I was wrong, and in retrospect, it might not have been the best conclusion to jump to, but he is unstable. For right now though, can we focus on the matter at hand and catch everyone up on the gossip later?” Lauren kind of felt like an asshole for assuming Hummel had decided killing his friends was his new career goal, but it was really not the time for them to hash that out. Not when they could be attacked at any time and they’d be cornered in that room.

 

“We are not leaving without them,” Mercedes said, her tone daring Lauren to disagree. Tina, Artie and Mike nodded agreement immediately, and Puckerman shrugged what was presumably assent.

 

“I’m not the type to cut and run unless there’s no other option, and I’m not the type to abandon people,” Lauren said sharply. Mercedes had the good grace to look slightly abashed, and Lauren probably deserved it anyway, after jumping to conclusions about Hummel, but whatever. Even if she wanted to ditch half their group, she had decided to get them all home alive, whether it was still there when they made it back or not, and she intended to succeed. “We need to find someplace safe for a while, we need a plan if we’re going to play this sick fuck’s game and it’s not going to happen if we get attacked.”

 

“We know where we can go,” Tina said, exchanging a glance with Mike. “Follow me.”

 

~*~

 

Rachel woke up unable to move her arms or legs, pinned to the ground by a heavy weight coiled around her. She blinked rapidly to clear her vision, and thing holding her down came into focus- a grey, snake-shaped thing as thick as her forearm, wrapped around her again and again with its slightly tapered end lying on the ground beside her face and twitching slightly.

 

“What?” She muttered before she bit back her surprise and sudden welling fear. She remembered the light fading out, and a sudden hard press of magic, and it must have been a sleep spell for her to go out so quickly.

 

She turned her head to the other side, where the tentacle extended back up towards a huge thing, extending from what looked like its back with eight other tentacles, arranged in a circle. Seven of them were short and dangling, but the last one was long, and she craned her neck without thinking to see where it led. It turned out to be Finn, restrained in the same way she was and eyes closed.

 

It suddenly hit Rachel that she was wrapped up and held immobile by some sort of creature, and she squirmed and wiggled in a sudden panic, trying to pull an arm free. Instead of loosening though, the tentacle pulled tighter and tighter, until a voice finally broke through to her.

 

“…Rachel! You have to stop struggling, calm down!” Quinn sounded scared, and that, more than her words, was what made Rachel freeze. The tentacle slowly relaxed its grip until it was back to the firm but not suffocating hold it had held before, and Rachel pulled in a long, shuddering breath.

 

She lifted her head to look at Quinn across the room, held back to back to back with Brittany and Santana by a single tentacle that extended back to a grey boulder-shaped thing identical to the one behind her and Finn. All three of them looked like they’d been on the losing side of a nasty fight, with the visible side of Brittany’s face as she craned her neck to look at Rachel one whole bruise.

 

“What is this thing?” Rachel asked, her voice unsteady. “What’s going on?”

 

Quinn was already looking away from her, eyes widening as quick footfalls echoed. A man appeared in the doorway and came into the room, surveying the room. It was a large, nondescript chamber, well-lit, and containing one more identical monster, but at least this one didn’t have any of her friends attached to it. Rachel turned her head back to the man, who looked completely harmless. She knew he was probably dangerous, but with his balding head, paunch and oddly coloured clothes, he reminded her of someone’s embarrassing uncle rather than any kind of epic villain. Despite her horror at the situation, she couldn’t help but wish she’d been captured by someone that at least looked threatening.

 

“Now that’s just rude,” he said in a scolding voice, looking straight at Rachel. She had a momentary panic that he could read her mind, but when he went on to say, “Sit them up, they look terribly uncomfortable lying down like that,” she relaxed a little when she realized he was addressing the creature. Her relief that he probably wasn’t reading her mind was short-lived though, because the thing immediately tilted her upright, slithering over her and adjusting its grip. Rachel shuddered and closed her eyes tight when the thing moaned and she realized that the tentacles extended from its back and it was curled up on its side. She didn’t want to see its front.

 

Beside her, Finn woke up as the creature pulled him into a sitting position, yelping in shock and struggling to escape. Rachel could see his neck flexing as he tried to force his way out, and his face got redder as he struggled to no avail.

 

The man looked at Finn as he strained at the tightening tentacle, waiting until he was barely wheezing in breaths before walking over to him and touching his shoulder. Finn went instantly rigid, and the tentacle relaxed.

 

“Well, now that we’re all nice and calm, my name is Sandy, and I’ll be entertaining myself with your suffering for next little while,” the man said pleasantly. “We’re just waiting for one more, and I’m sure it’ll be here soon, it just is  _terrible_  with directions, if you can believe it, and then we can get started. Okay? Good.”

 

Rachel closed her eyes to give herself a pep talk.  _It’s going to be okay_ , she told herself.  _The villain always seems to triumph first, and then the heroes use their courage and wits to win. This is just how it’s supposed to go_.  _There is always a moment in every great story where the situation seems hopeless._  She hadn’t really expected it to happen so soon, but she could work with this.

 

The spell that Sandy had used wore off Finn quickly, and he slumped slightly in the monster’s hold and turned his head to look at Rachel.  _It’s going to be okay,_  he mouthed, smiling reassuringly. Rachel mustered up a smile in return, but it dropped off her face when  _something_  trundled slowly into the room and she had the distinct displeasure in seeing what the thing holding onto her looked like.

 

She was so fixated on staring at it, vaguely human looking but with dead-looking grey skin on a lumpy, misshapen body and a horrifically distorted face with slack features and yellow, sharp-looking teeth, that she almost missed Kurt. The monster was carrying him behind itself with several of its tentacles coiled around him, and although his eyes were open, he didn’t seem to be paying attention to his surroundings.

 

“Now really,” Sandy said in a scolding tone. “What took you so long? We’ve been here so long, I can’t believe you still can’t find your way around.”

 

The monster lowered its head, looking almost abashed. “Oh, I can’t stay mad at you,” Sandy relented, patting the monster on its arm. He lowered his voice to a stage whisper and asked, “Has he said anything yet? Like “My friend is going to come and make you regret this, I promise”? I love it when they make empty threats.”

 

The creature shook its head. “Well, that’s disappointing.” Sandy put on an exaggerated pout, and pointed to the wall farthest from the door. “He does seem rather lifeless, doesn’t he? Are you squeezing a little too hard?” The monster grunted. “Well, if you say so. Settle down over there and we’ll get started.

 

 The creature trundled past Rachel, dragging one of Kurt’s feet along the stone floor and tracing a path in the dust, and sat down clumsily, facing the wall. It arranged Kurt so that he was sitting like Rachel was, and he happened to end up staring directly at her, his face disconcertingly vacant.

 

“You’re up first, I suppose,” he said to Quinn. Rachel tore her gaze away from Kurt to watch. “What brings such a large group of young people here? Not that I’m not grateful, but I am quite curious.”

 

Quinn stared up at him, obstinately silent. “Well, I already know that you’re trying to get home, and that there was a ‘she’ who was apparently quite creative when it came to manipulation. You’re only hurting yourself, you know. And your friends.” The tentacle wound tighter around Rachel, squeezing uncomfortably at first, but moving quickly into painful. Finn grunted in pain beside her, and Quinn flinched as she, Brittany and Santana were pulled tighter together but didn’t speak.

 

Over the blood pounding in her ears and her rasp for breath, she could barely hear a pained whimper coming from Kurt’s direction. The pressure on her ribcage slackened suddenly, leaving her gasping for air and blinking tears out of her eyes, and by the time the black dots had cleared from her vision, Sandy was standing in front of Kurt, who was looking up at him with a pained and confused look on his face.

 

“ _There_  you are, I was getting concerned. Imagine if our heroine got here to rescue her poor, damaged companion, and he wasn’t even in a state to realize how much she cared! That would be just awful, truly. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you!” he snapped at Quinn, attitude changing in an instant from condescending to angry. “You’re going to tell me everything. Keep in mind that I don’t need all of you to survive for my grand finale to still be magnificent.” He turned back to Kurt, who had schooled his expression to neutrality in the interim and stared challengingly up.

 

“I’ve seen people like you before.” Sandy said it without preamble or moving. “Back when there were people here. We were an outpost in a wild place, and sometimes people would get taken and return some time later, after being held captive by orcs and the like. The ones that had really awful things done to them, usually they would pretend that nothing was wrong, but everyone knew that something was. They’d drift off in the middle of conversation, sometimes, and just stare off into space. Memory can be a terrible thing, wouldn’t you agree?” He crouched in front of Kurt, who didn’t move, didn’t react, except to follow him down with his wide-eyed gaze, his breathing short and sharp.

 

“I was a cleric, but your friend figured that part out already. You were right about the other thing too. I was here when the Spellplague hit, and it changed me. And I mean, I wasn’t the greatest person, in retrospect. Did you know that when someone’s mind drifts away like yours does, you can do whatever you want to their body? And no one ever thinks that you would do that, as a man of the gods, sworn to healing. But the Spellplague came. It swept through here, and it killed nearly everyone. I was in my workshop healing when it happened, and the divine magic I was channeling protected me from dying. But nothing can protect you from this.” He lifted a hand, and it erupted with a blue glow that Rachel recognized immediately. Kurt flinched finally, turning his face away as Sandy stroked a glowing finger down it. He held the magic for a moment before clenching his fist, extinguishing it.

 

“So I was alone. I didn’t want to leave, and after a while, I couldn’t. My magic had become mixed, somehow a combination of divine and Weave magic and I was tied here. And I was lonely. A little of my god’s magic had gotten wrapped up inside me, and I was able to use it to raise the dead as mindless ghouls and I would have them put on little plays. I did that when they were alive too, don’t look at me like that.” Kurt averted his eyes again. “I would put together productions, just simple ones, and everyone would be so much happier afterwards. They kept us going, and after I was alone, putting on the shows kept me going. Corpses are rather notorious for their decay rate though, and so that didn’t last very long. I ended up using the last of them to make these golems.” He stroked a hand over the tentacle around Kurt’s chest, which shuddered and rubbed against him in reaction. “They last longer, but they’re not terribly smart, poor things, and I miss having something that can take direction around. I was so pleased when you kids came down here. I thought you were just going to poke around upstairs and leave.”

 

“What are you going to do?” Kurt asked, a surprising lack of inflection in his voice. If it had been Rachel on the receiving end of a villainous monologue, she would have been much more enthusiastic in her outraged response.

 

“I’m glad you asked! We’re putting on our very own production, but this one will be much more interesting. I’ve missed having a degree of unpredictability, so I’ve only set the stage and I’m going to let all of you decide how it ends. Imagine if you will, our amazing, brave heroine, who has suffered but promises to stand by her best friend in the world, who has been keeping secrets that could destroy everything he has left. He’s just about to admit everything to her, when he is suddenly swept away by a powerful villain and she must fight to save him, despite knowing that he has done something truly awful. I think it could be the best production I’ve ever put on, honestly. And then there’s everyone else, who I’m sure will be able to find a role. What do you think?”

 

“You’re insane.” Kurt blanched as soon as he said the words, and Rachel couldn’t hold back a gasp at his kneejerk response.  

 

Instead of having the creature holding him to crush Kurt though, like all the villains Rachel had ever read about would have, Sandy just smiled enigmatically. “Well, it takes one to know one,” he said, straightening abruptly. “I’ll be back later to do some basic torturing, I’m going to leave you to talk amongst yourselves while I go check on the rescue party.”

 

Rachel held her breath until Sandy had swept from the room and waited until the sound of his footsteps had long since receded to ask, “Is everyone okay?” She got shrugs and slight nods in response, as well as Kurt lighting up violently fast with a magical blue glow. “Um, Kurt, what are you doing?”

 

“I’m not playing some sick idea of a game again,” he said. His tone was sharp, but Rachel could hear an underlying current of an emotion she couldn’t place. “Once was enough. I can’t do it twice.”

 

“Stop being such a martyr,” Santana snapped. “What’s your plan here? Take on all four of these things by yourself? They will  _kill_ you, Kurt, you can’t handle all of them even if you can make that one let you go, and we can’t help you. Swords are useless against these things, and we lost ours in the fight anyway.”

 

“I’m not stupid enough to try to fight them,” he informed her, a hint of the Kurt who always needed to prove his superiority bleeding through. “Watch and learn.” He closed his eyes and wiggled a little, adjusting his hands so they were fully touching the tentacle wrapped around him.

 

“Kurt?” Rachel asked when he stayed motionless, the blue glow of magic pulsating and shifting around him but not doing anything visible. He didn’t respond, but he furrowed his brow in concentration, grimacing like he was in pain.

 

After a few long, tense minutes, Kurt’s face relaxed and he slumped forward. At the same instant, the creature that was holding him picked him off the ground into a mockery of a standing position, moving jerkily and slowly, before rapidly uncoiling from around him and allowing him to crumple limply to the stone floor with a thud, where he lay still. The monster curled back up, and Kurt stayed still for a moment, breathing lightly through his nose, before he pushed himself up into a kneeling position, swaying slightly. Rachel closed her mouth with a snap when she realized that it had fallen open.

 

“What was that?” Brittany asked. “Do you have mind powers now, Kurt? What am I thinking?”

 

“I don’t have mind powers,” Kurt mumbled. “These things don’t have minds, not really. He was putting on a show if he pretended that they did. He has to control their every action directly, and we’re similar enough that it was just a matter of pushing enough of my magic into it until I could get control. I’m not very good at it though, obviously. Moving two bodies at once is kind of difficult.”

 

“Can you get us free too? You look like you’re about to faint.” Quinn looked at him in concern, but if it was actually for Kurt, who Quinn was mostly indifferent to as far as Rachel knew, or if she was afraid of what would happen if Sandy came back and they were still mostly helpless, Rachel couldn’t tell. Rachel hoped that Kurt could get the rest of them free, really, because as much as her soul yearned for an epic battle, she didn’t have her sword anymore either and would not be much use in a fight. Escaping would be much more preferable than trying to fight barehanded. Finn had his sword still, in a scabbard across his back, and Santana and Quinn still had their bows, from what she could see, but they weren’t in any condition for a real fight. The near crushing that had been delivered earlier was still throbbing in places.

 

Instead of responding, Kurt got to his feet with a visible effort and stumbled over to Rachel, kneeling behind her. He got a tight grip on the tentacle and murmured, “He might be able to feel a disruption, I don’t know. We need to move fast, so get me over to the other one as quickly as you can when you’re free, okay?” Rachel craned her neck to watch as he lit up with magic again, closing his eyes.

 

An instant later, the tentacle flailed, tossing Rachel sideways and around Kurt, squeezing the two of them together and pinning Kurt to the back of the monster. “What did you  _do_?” Rachel squeaked in shock and sudden breathlessness as it pulled them tighter.

 

“Wasn’t me,” Kurt gasped, squeezing his eyes closed tighter and glowing brighter. Rachel’s hair prickled on her scalp, and a buzzing began under her skin at how much magic he was pulling from himself. Kurt’s head flopped loosely onto her shoulder after only a few seconds, and Rachel was unceremoniously dumped to the ground with Kurt on top of her after a dizzying twirl as the tentacle unwound. Finn was there before she caught her breath, picking Kurt off of her and holding him up with an arm around his waist.

 

“Are you hurt?” Finn asked her concernedly. “Do you need a hand?”

 

“No,” she forced out between gasps. “Winded. Take him over there.” She got a hand up to point in Quinn’s general direction, and Finn hiked his grip on Kurt a little higher when his knees refused to support him, dragging him across the room.

 

She heard Kurt murmur, “Easier that time, but he knows what I’m doing for sure. We need to get away from these things, I don’t know why he hasn’t activated them yet.”

 

As soon as she could breathe again, Rachel got on her feet and rushed to the room’s entrance. She couldn’t hear anything or anyone coming, and stole a glance backward to see Kurt lighting up a third time. By the time that everyone was free, the monsters still hadn’t moved again outside of Kurt’s control, and Rachel’s sense of foreboding was rocketing higher and higher, like they were just waiting for something to go terribly wrong.

 

The others joined her by the door, Finn holding up Kurt. “Are you going to be all right?” Rachel asked.

 

“It was just too much all at once,” Kurt whispered, eyelids drooping. “His grip on them is really strong, and it took a lot of magic to break it even a little. I’ll be okay.”

 

“No, you won’t.” Rachel whirled around just in time for a blast of power to hit her like a falling rock. She stumbled backwards, and into Santana, who was similarly reeling. “All you had to do was sit and wait for rescue. You weren’t supposed to try to escape, and you’ve ruined everything.” Sandy emerged from the shadows, rage contorting his face. “And you’re going to be very sorry for it.”

 

~*~

 

Tina slipped around the arch of the doorframe, leaning back out seconds later. “All clear,” she said quietly. “We should be safe in here for the time being.”

 

Mercedes followed Mike into the magic workshop, stopping at the door to watch Puck’s back as he came in last. “Don’t touch anything,” Tina said, “I know that some of the stuff in here is trapped, but we can seal the doorway if that monster comes back until we figure out a plan.”

 

The top of a nearby table was littered with scrolls of paper and long forgotten ink pots. One had a spell half inscribed, like the wizard working on it had stepped away and never come back. A touch on her arm startled her, and she spun around to see Lauren looking at her seriously. “You said you and Hummel met that guy before you got attacked, right?”

 

Mercedes paused, trying to figure out the best way to get across what the cleric had said without sharing about Kurt’s breakdown and attempted confession. “Yeah. Kurt and I were talking, and he interrupted us. He said that we were interesting, that we were the leads in his project. Then I tried to cast a protection spell and he attacked me.”

 

Tina tilted her head to one side, looking apologetic. “Can you be a little more specific? We’re kind of shooting in the dark here, and we need more information. Why did he think you and Kurt were interesting? Did he seem threatened by the spell, or did he just want to show you how easily he could hurt you?”

 

Conflicted, Mercedes bit her lip. She knew that they needed to understand what was happening if they wanted to have a chance of coming out alive. He was powerful, anything that could combine the strength of an abomination and a cleric would be, and she knew firsthand in his case from how hard he’d blasted her with power to disrupt her spell. There was a significant chance that they would lose in an all-out fight. Kurt would be upset if she told everyone what he had said to her in private, but the man who’d taken him had already heard it. There wasn’t a secret left to keep. She turned back to Lauren. “What did Kurt tell you? About Sorin. We were talking about her.”

 

“He confirmed that Lilsholm was destroyed,” Lauren replied after a moment. “He said that she made him watch the fires burn. And that he saw us lose that fight, but that she prevented him from helping.”

 

Mike and Tina grabbed each other’s hands, suddenly wide-eyed and horrified. Puck and Artie looked unsurprised; Lauren must have told them already. Mercedes froze for an instant, then relaxed again slightly, feeling a little relieved. If that was a lie, then maybe they still had a home to go back to. “Kurt said that he lied to you about that.” The mood lifted a little. As long as there wasn’t confirmation, there was hope. “He said that she made him do something, he didn’t say what, but it was bad. All I know is that Sorin took him back into town after we were unconscious and something happened there. He didn’t get a chance to say what before that guy came, and he’d obviously overheard what Kurt said and I guess he thought it would be dramatic to separate us so he couldn’t finish telling me what happened. I don’t know.” Mercedes clenched her fist, frustrated at the situation.

 

“Wait,” Puck said. “If Kurt thought that lying about Lilsholm being burned to the ground was an improvement over telling us what actually happened, doesn’t that kind of mean that whatever happened was really, really, bad?”

 

“Not necessarily,” Lauren said. “He doesn’t trust me. If it’s personal enough, I could see him lying about the worst thing he could think of to get me to stop asking questions. It explains why he hasn’t told anyone else, too.” The others seemed to accept that, but Mercedes couldn’t. The memory of Kurt’s face, the self-loathing that had been in his voice, his belief that Mercedes would hate him for what he’d been forced to do, it was bad. She didn’t know what it had been, and she didn’t want to try to imagine what someone controlling Kurt’s actions could have made him do, but Mercedes knew for certain that it had been awful.

 

“What do we do now, though?” Artie asked, bringing the conversation back to their immediate danger. “We don’t even know where the others are, much less have any idea how to rescue them.”

 

“He wants this to be like a play,” Mike said. “He’s designated the hero, the plot, the villain, the supporting cast. He was surprised that Tina and I were with you guys, we were definitely supposed to be captured with the others and he didn’t seem to like that it threw off his plan. I think we should keep trying to not let this happen like he wants. We just need to figure out what he expects the “heroes” to do next and then not do it.”

 

“I kind of wish Rachel was here,” Artie sighed. “This would definitely play to her strengths. What would heroes in a play do next? I don’t think waiting in a sealed room for the monsters to come to them is right. They’d probably go out and search the hallways for where their friends are, right? So, what, we shouldn’t do that?”

 

“Waiting here doesn’t seem like a good rescue tactic,” Mercedes pointed out. “If we play along, it might put him in a better mood and he’ll be less likely to just kill us. He likes heroic adventure stories, maybe if we give him a good one he’ll let us go.”

 

“And maybe if we just let Sorin catch us, she’d tell us that she just wanted to see us one more time before she left us alone forever and ever,” Puck said, deadly serious. “If we play his game, we’ll lose. Commander Beiste always said that you can’t trust a monster, and if Kurt said that guy’s an abomination, he probably is. I don’t want to just stay here and wait, but we’re in trouble if that thing can cast like Kurt can.”

 

Lauren tapped her hand on the shaft of her hammer pensively. “The thing is, even if we come up with a plan, how do we know he isn’t listening to us right now?”

 

“Because that would be rude!” a voice called from the hallway. Tina slapped her hand against the doorframe, and a translucent shield appeared. “Hello again,” the man said as he appeared in front of the shield. “I was wondering what you all were up to, and I have to say, you don’t seem to be trying that hard. I’m going to put in some measures to liven this up a little, how do you feel about me delivering fingers?”

 

“What are you?” Lauren demanded, ignoring the obvious attempt at baiting them.

 

“I’ve already been over this with the other group, you can ask them for the nitty gritty of it if you get a chance before you die. Long story short, I was a cleric, I was lucky enough to be channeling healing magic when the Spellplague hit here, and all that magic got wrapped up in me and kept me from dying like everyone else. Now, were you actually planning to rescue your friends, or are you just going to hide behind a-”

 

He froze, the smile on his face becoming stiff and fake. Mercedes stared at him as he held still, before his smile suddenly warped into a snarl, and he swore, “That little  _shit_.” Without any kind of explanation, he turned and ran back the direction he’d come from.

 

“Follow him?” Puck suggested.

 

“I’d say it’s a trap,” Lauren said drily, “But that wasn’t very villain-like, and he’s been playing his role so far. The others might have done something to throw a wrench into his perfect project. We should definitely go.”

 

Tina was already moving to unshield the door, running her hand nimbly in a pattern over the doorframe and rushing through as the shield dissolved. Mercedes followed Tina at a run, catching a glimpse of the man turning a corner, and nearly stumbled turning to chase him. As she ran, she grasped her holy symbol, mumbling a prayer for protection to her god. She felt an answering warmth that came with a promise for protection, and smiled at the sense of peace that came from being suffused with divine power.

 

Tina stopped suddenly front of her, throwing out her arm to stop Mercedes. The air in front of them glistened faintly with magic, nearly invisible but extremely threatening. “What will that do?” Lauren asked. “Kill us?”

 

“No,” Mercedes replied, “it’s just a shield. He doesn’t want us following too close. Artie, can you take it down?”

 

“No problem,” he said, approaching it. Mercedes took a step back to give him room to cast the spell, just as a scream reverberated down the passage.

 

Artie kept up his spell, unrattled, as Tina whispered, “That was Santana.” Artie cast his spell, and the shield sputtered and fizzed into nothing.

 

A deeper pained cry echoed around them, and Mercedes broke into a run.

  
  
~*~

 

Quinn tucked and rolled, coming up with an arrow nocked and firing in one smooth motion. Sandy deflected it with a flick of magic, and sent a blast at her in return. Quinn had already moved though, and it sailed harmlessly by. Finn had his sword, the only one of them still armed with a melee weapon except for Brittany, who was wielding Kurt’s dagger, and charged at Sandy only to be tossed back effortlessly. Kurt sagged against an unarmed Rachel, who was hanging back and singing a song that made some of the aches and bruises from their last fight less painful. Brittany danced around, looking for an opening, and Santana stuck behind her, holding her fire for the opportune moment.

 

Brittany dashed in and swung hard, scoring a deep gash down Sandy’s back. In return, he lashed out, missing Brittany but hitting Santana hard and square as she dodged to the wrong side and drawing a loud shriek of pain from her as she was blasted backwards. She hit the wall hard and slid down, not moving.

 

“One hundred years of being alone and waiting,” Sandy mused as he pranced backwards, away from Brittany, absently dodging Finn’s attack. “And I get so many people in one day.” He didn’t seem happy. “I thought I could fix things by skipping ahead to the part where I kill you all and imagine that you did better later, but it just isn’t the same. I’m going to go get the rest of you, and then we can have a properly dramatic ending.” He punched out quickly at Kurt and Rachel, knocking them to the ground with a painful-looking blast, and smoothly grabbed Finn’s wrist as he attacked again, twisting and breaking it with a sickening snap. Finn cried out in pain, and Sandy released him and ran for the door, calling, “Don’t go too far!” over his shoulder.

 

Kurt rolled over and threw a ball of fire at Sandy’s back, striking him just before he turned the corner. Quinn released an arrow at the same instant, and it struck true. “You don’t get to turn your back on us,” Quinn said. “We’re not your puppets.”

 

Sandy turned back to them, all traces of flippancy gone. “Aren’t you?” Focused on Sandy, Quinn was surprised by the impact on her back that crushed her to the floor. “Did you forget where you are? What’s in here with us?” Quinn got up to all fours, scrabbling for her bow. The monster that had hit her got her first though, scooping her up around her midsection and tossing her carelessly. Quinn hit the ground again, and stayed down, tears of pain in her eyes and her breath coming short. All four of the monsters were up now, and lashing out violently. Quinn was wrapped up tightly before she could recover, and the monster dragged her behind it as it headed for Santana, smacking her back against the wall and wrapping her up as well.

 

Quinn struggled against the binding tentacle, but it didn’t loosen or tighten, simply holding steady and tight. Finn kicked out, weak with pain, as the golem wrapped him up, and Rachel and Kurt had been easily subdued and restrained.

 

Sandy stood watching in the doorway as Brittany dodged the flailing tentacles. Within moments he apparently decided that waiting wasn’t worth it and he hit her hard with a magical blast, knocking her into a waiting tentacle that wound around her tightly.

 

“There,” he said. “All my little puppets on strings. I suppose the easiest thing now is to let them come to us.”

 

~*~

 

It had gone quiet, Mercedes processed as they ran. The distance had seemed shorter, but that had been a trick of the echo, apparently, and the lighted room that seemed to be their destination had been much deeper underground than they had thought.

 

They were up against a man who had, by some fluke, held onto some measure of divine power when he should have been transformed into a horrific abomination, or at least killed. From the way he had spoken, the source of his magic was the Spellplague, like Kurt, but the original source of at least part of it was a god, and Mercedes had no idea how to deal with that, but she knew that she was the best equipped of their group to handle the divine side of it. If Kurt could help her control the Spellplague side of his magic, maybe they could get lucky. Mercedes frowned. That was a big maybe.

 

Mercedes skittered to a halt just short of the lit archway when someone roughly grabbed her cloak. She swiveled her head to see Lauren looking grim. "Let me go first," she said, barely making any sound at all. She pulled her hammer out of its sling across her back, and jerked her head to Puck, who already had his axe in hand when he came to stand beside her.

 

Lauren peered around the corner slowly and smoothly. Her face was white in the dim light when she turned back to them. "You didn't do those monsters justice, Chang." She shook her head disbelievingly. "We've got four of them, plus the king of assholes, and the rest of our group, but they're not going to be helpful. It looks like they tried to stage an escape and got the crap beaten out of them, because he looks like he's giving a traditional villain speech right now."

 

"Four of those things?" Mercedes whispered, her heart sinking. "One of them is enough."

 

"Chang, you said they were slow?" Mike nodded and Lauren took a deep breath. "Okay, keep moving, don't give them a stationary target. Artie, if we know magic can hurt them, you try to incapacitate them, okay? Buy us some time to get at the boss guy." Artie nodded. "Everyone else, don't even try to hurt the monsters. We know we can't hurt them with the weapons we have. Concentrate your attacks on the abomination, and don't get hit."

 

Mike drew his sword and pulled his shield down his arm, untying his cloak and letting it drop. Mercedes did the same, and so did Tina. Puck and Lauren had already dropped their cloaks at some point. Lauren nodded at them when they were ready. Mercedes forced her face into calm, not wanting to show her fear, and followed Lauren's practiced cocky saunter into the room.

 

The first thing she saw was Kurt, hanging from a tentacle coiled loosely around his torso. She couldn't tell if he was breathing or not, and a tight panic flared in her chest. Rachel was conscious beside him, and another monster held Quinn, Finn and Santana, who were focused on the man, who had ceased to talk and was looking at them smugly. A third monster held Brittany, who was grimacing with pain, and the fourth stood silent and still.

 

"Hey, shithead, ready to die?" Lauren asked. The man turned and looked at her, curling his lip.

 

"No, no, that's just not working for me. Go back out, and come back in, but this time, have the cleric say something like "You're going to regret messing with me!" I really wanted her to be the hero of this one, it was just so poetic, and everyone knows that the hero delivers the pre-fight empty threats."

 

"It's not empty, and you will regret this," Mercedes said. "I know what you are, and I know how to kill you."

 

"That was a little better, but still not great," he said, pouting slightly. "I guess I'll just have to add it to my rewrites. They're already quite extensive. I didn't get a chance to find out your tragic pasts, so I'll have to make that up too. Skipping to the end causes so many problems." He sighed melodramatically.

 

Behind the man, the monster holding Kurt and Rachel slowly began to unfurl its tentacles, depositing the both of them on the floor. Rachel emphatically gestured for Mercedes to continue, and she quickly looked back to the man.

 

"We could, um, tell you about it so you don't have to make it up?" Mercedes offered hesitantly.

 

"No, no, that's quite alright," he replied. "If there's one thing I learned today, it's that fantasy never lives up to reality. I'm just going to kill you all now."

 

Mercedes flung herself to the side as soon as he finished speaking, and the blast of magic that he immediately flung at her hit the wall behind her with a loud bang. Puck charged straight forward as Lauren and Mike circled to try to flank, and Tina had throwing knives in her hands, waiting for an opportunity. Artie shot several small magical missiles at the creature holding Finn, Quinn and Santana that pierced its thick hide, somehow, but it didn't get any kind of reaction.

 

The monster that had put Kurt and Rachel down lumbered slowly over to the one that hadn't held anyone, jerkily tangling it up with its tentacles and then leaning on it until they crashed to the ground. Mercedes gaped in confusion, and nearly faltered in her prayer for magical strength. Her confusion disappeared when Rachel popped up next to her just after Mercedes cast the spell. "It's Kurt, he figured out that they aren't autonomous and how to steal control of them from Sandy, but he can only move one body at once which is why he's on the ground right now. Can I borrow this? Thanks." She snagged Mercedes' mace and danced off to attack the man.

 

Kurt was stirring and Mercedes rushed to him, keeping an eye on the two monsters that weren't tied up in each other. "Kurt?" she said questioningly. "Are you hurt? Can you get up? I need your help."

 

He gasped in a breath, trying to align trembling limbs underneath himself. "What do you need me to do?" he whispered, watching the fight. The monsters were trying to disentangle themselves, and the man looked apoplectic with rage, stealing glances at Kurt but kept occupied fending off Puck, Lauren, Rachel and Mike with the occasional thrown knife from Tina. He couldn't control all the monsters at once and fight them, Mercedes realized as the two entangled creatures stilled when he was forced to dodge a particularly fast swing from Mike. If they could keep him occupied long enough, maybe he wouldn't be able to involve the monsters.

 

"You remember that vampire thing you did by accident? I need his Spellplague magic weakened so I can get at his divine magic. It isn't meant to be imprisoned in a body and if I give it a conduit, it should all come out at once. That’ll give us a chance, and it might even kill him outright."

 

Kurt frowned a little. "I can try. I'm not sure if I remember that one." He closed his eyes. "Oh, there it is." His hand began to pulse blue-green, and he shoved himself to his feet. His eyes blazed brightly with magic, and broke into a surprisingly fast run and launched himself at the man, knocking him over and gripping the man’s face with his glowing hand.

 

Mercedes was praying for a divine intervention before they even hit the ground, raising her voice and allowing the cadence to speak for itself. The man blasted Kurt off of him after only a few seconds, and leapt to his feet, flinging blasts of magic at random. Puck stumbled back and dropped when he was hit by one, and the rest of them backed away to get more room to dodge.

 

She concentrated on her prayer. There were some cleric spells that allowed leeway in the incantation, but this was not one of them. She’d be the conduit for only the gods knew how much power, and it could burn her on the way through if she did it wrong. She’d just have to hope that he was angry enough to neglect aiming. Kurt had used that spell before, but only once, and it had been on her in an accidental flare of magic. Mercedes remembered it hurting enough that she couldn’t think straight afterwards and dragging out enough of her energy in passing contact that she had slept for hours longer than usual that night. She could only imagine how badly it would sting when he meant to use it.

 

The man appeared in front of her suddenly, calmer than he had been and a manic look in his eyes. “Well, you seem to be stepping up into hero of the story mode now, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop you here.” Mercedes ignored him. She couldn’t stop now, she had to finish it, finish  _him_. She spoke louder, filling the chamber with her prayer. Lauren was running towards her, Mike was charging, eyes wide and scared, Tina was screaming something, a warning?, but she had to stop him, it was her duty to destroy abominations as a servant of the gods, her job to protect her friends as a cleric.

 

She finished the spell and reached out for the man’s face. She felt a dull pain in her chest in the instant before she made contact, but caught up in the warm of divine magic, she didn’t falter, bridging the final gap and holding on.

 

A blast of white glowing magic filled the room, and Mercedes breathed a sigh of relief that it had worked. The sigh caught weirdly, though, the ecstasy of the magic quickly receding and being replaced by an agonizing, ripping pain. She looked down as the spots cleared from her vision, and stared in pained confusion at the long dagger stuck into her chest.

 

She looked up again, and the man smirked down at her. “Mistake,” he mouthed, any sound lost over the rushing of blood in her ears. She felt a hard jolt, and when the world came back she was on her knees and the man had a hold of the dagger hilt. He tore it out of her, causing a new rush of agony that greyed out her vision, and whirled to face Mike, blocking his swing with the bloody dagger.

 

Mercedes tried to focus. Her breath felt wrong, raspy, and blood gushed out of the stab wound in time with her heart beat.  _Fatal without healing_ , she thought slowly,  _so you need to do it_. The words wouldn’t come to mind though, and when she opened her mouth, she couldn’t hear the sounds she made.

 

Kurt was there, kneeling in front of her, his face filthy with dirt and streaked with tears. He was sobbing messily as he wrapped his hand in his cloak and lifted it to her chest, pressing hard against the injury. Mercedes lost time again, and was aware of lying against a soft, upright surface that heaved unsteadily as sound roared in her ears. She tried to speak, to reassure the others, but everything was fading away again, and an overwhelming sense of peace enveloped her.

 

~*~

 

The sound that Mercedes had made when she had realized she’d been stabbed would stick with Lauren for a long time, she knew. The sound that Hummel was making now, after Mercedes had coughed blood all over him and fallen still, would probably last just as long in her memory.

 

She was incredibly angry, her hands shaking despite her firm grip on her hammer. She had promised herself to keep them alive, and she knew it was naive, that they were outclassed by everything that seemed to want them dead and really didn’t stand a chance, but she had  _promised_. She delivered a powerful swipe at him, but the man danced away. The others were fighting or incapacitated or crying, and the least she could do was finish the job Mercedes had started.

 

The man retaliated with a close range blast of magic that washed over her painlessly, confirming that whatever Mercedes had been trying to do, it had worked. A large magic bolt shot over her shoulder, courtesy of Artie, and pierced deep into the man’s shoulder. The dagger clattered to the floor as the man’s arm flopped lifelessly to his side. Mike spun around Lauren and stabbed his sword deep into the man’s gut, twisting it to the side before pulling it out again. The man screamed in pain, and a dark gratitude that he could feel what they were doing to him rushed through Lauren. Tina flung a knife that hit square on his chest, and Rachel bashed him from behind with Mercedes’ mace.

 

An arrow whistled by, striking him square in the chest. Lauren turned to see Quinn, covered with a putrid muck and holding her bow. The monsters were gone, she realized. Whatever Mercedes had done, it had destroyed them as well as all of the power behind the man’s magic. All that was left of the creatures was the slimy residue that covered Quinn, Santana, Brittany and Finn and formed large puddles under piles of bones that looked disturbingly human.

 

The man’s eyes were wide and fearful, and Lauren savoured it. “She said that you would regret it,” she snarled, hefting her hammer. “I hope you do.” She swung hard in a horizontal arc, hitting the side of his head with a crunch of skull shattering. She followed him down, hitting him three more times before she let her hammer drop, breathing hard and her vision blurring with tears.

 

Brittany was picking up Santana, who didn’t seem able to move much on her own and dragging her out of the puddle of mush and fluid that had once been one of the monsters. Finn was favouring a clearly broken wrist, and Puckerman was still down from the last hard blow, but his eyes were open and teary as he watched Hummel cradle Mercedes. Tina was stumbling over and sobbing, and Mike caught her before she fell and they leaned on each other. Rachel was wide-eyed and staring, and Quinn’s lower lip was trembling. Artie came closer, but stopped after only a few feet and buried his face in his hands.

 

Hummel had fallen silent. Mercedes’ blood streaked up his throat, and he seriously looked like he was going to faint. Mike and Tina knelt beside the two of them, and Tina reached out to touch Mercedes’ shoulder, shying away at the last instant. Hummel looked up at them, face pale and eyes wide.

 

“I don’t...I...” He trailed off, fingers plucking at the back of Mercedes’ leather armour. His face crumpled, and he broke down again, ducking his face into her hair. Lauren turned away and left the room, retrieving Mercedes’ cloak. She knelt on the other side of Hummel and cast it over Mercedes’ back, tucking in the edges underneath her. Lauren gently removed his arms from around her, moving automatically and unthinkingly as she carefully rolled Mercedes’ body off of Hummel and onto her back, tucking the cloak in around her.

 

“Tina,” she said, her voice sounding oddly high-pitched and rough to her ears. She waited for Tina to look at her and asked, “Do you still have that scroll?” Tina nodded wordlessly but tearfully, and dug into her belt pouch, pulling it out. “We need to get out of here while we can, the way our luck goes I guarantee there’s something else down here that wants us dead. Puckerman, Chang, help me with Mercedes?”

 

They were defeated, pathetic, Lauren realized as Mike helped her lay Mercedes across her shoulders. Hudson winced with every step he took, wrist swollen and broken. He’d needed Berry’s help to get his sword back in its scabbard. Santana was leaning heavily on Brittany and Quinn, still looking woozy and pained. Puckerman was limping, and Artie gripped the scroll that was their ticket out with a white-knuckled desperation. Hummel had his arms wrapped so tightly around himself Lauren was surprised he could still breathe, and was listing to the side, eyes half-lidded in grief or exhaustion, she wasn’t sure which.  Hudson tried to wrap his good arm around his shoulders when Hummel nearly toppled over, but he shied away, standing slightly apart from the rest of them.

 

Tina stood at the doorway, holding a torch she’d taken off a wall sconce. “It’s clear out here,” she rasped, her eyes red and swollen from crying. She stepped outside, setting a slow pace so the injured could keep up. Lauren didn’t realize how bad the chamber had stunk of putrid, rotting flesh until a blast of fresher air from the passageway reached her. The smell of Mercedes’ blood replaced it, and within seconds the bitter, acrid scent had her trying not to throw up.

 

They walked slowly and silently, broken only by faint gasps of pain and the occasional sob. Lauren’s legs got heavier with every step, but she pressed on.  _You promised_.  _You promised that you would get them home safe_ , ran through her mind again and again, haunting her. Lauren phased out slightly of paying attention, focusing on putting on foot in front of the other and not collapsing.

 

Finn stopped her with a hand on her wrist eventually. “We need to take a break,” he said quietly. “Santana’s not doing too well, and I don’t think Kurt or Puck is either. Or you.” He helped her kneel one-handedly and lay Mercedes down on the ground. Quinn and Brittany put Santana down, and Puck knelt with a pained expression. Lauren put some distance between her and Mercedes, trying to get the scent of blood out of her nose.

 

“How badly are you hurt?” she whispered to Puck.

 

“Ribs are broken, I think” he said. “Hurts like a bitch, anyway. How far out are we from the portal?”

 

“Maybe a few minutes? This place isn’t as big as it seems. We’re just moving slowly.” Lauren froze at an unexpected sound. There was someone coming up the tunnel behind them. They were trying to hide themselves, but Lauren could hear their footsteps clear as day now that she was listening for them and they weren’t in any condition to fight. “We’ve got company,” she mouthed silently, pulling her hammer off her back. Puck reached for his axe but couldn’t make it, dropping his hand back to his side with a pained grimace. “We can’t fight, we have to run.”

 

Quinn was taut with tension, nearly vibrating. She had clearly heard it too. Lauren jerked her head towards Santana, and Quinn gestured to Brittany in response, picking her back up between them. Hudson was looking around in confusion, and Lauren gestured for him to be silent and to start moving. Mike moved to Puckerman and got him up, clearly picking up on the sudden tension and sense of urgency.

 

Hummel had his head cocked to one side like he was listening to something, standing in the middle of the passageway. Lauren stopped in front of him and grabbed his shoulder in an attempt to get his attention. He focused in on her face after a moment, and frowned. “I’m sorry for lying to you,” he said dully. “I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself either.”

 

Lauren nearly choked. Really? He thought this was the best time? “Mercedes told us that you lied about Lilsholm getting burned down. We can talk about this later, right now we have to go.”

 

“That wasn’t the part I lied about, I-” Anything else he was planning to say cut off abruptly by a high-pitched whir of a fast moving projectile. Hummel let out a choked-off gasp of pain as he slumped forward onto Lauren, revealing the crossbow bolt sticking out of his shoulder. She held him up, wrapping one arm around him and keeping a grip on her hammer with the other.

 

“Hello there, kids,” said a deep, feminine, familiar voice. “I’ve been looking for you, and let me tell you now, I am done fucking around.” Sorin emerged from the shadows of the tunnel behind them, lowering a crossbow. “You don’t look like you’re ready for a fight. I suggest that you just accept defeat now and save yourselves the pain.”

 

“Lauren,” Kurt murmured against her chest. “I can distract her, and the rest of you can run.”

 

“We’re not leaving you,” Lauren mumbled back, trying to sound as stern as she could.

 

Hummel stiffened against her. “You  _should_ , though. And you will.” He got his legs back underneath him, grimacing with pain but pushing off of Lauren anyway and turning to face Sorin. “We’re not surrendering,” he announced. “I know what you’d do.”

 

Sorin bared her teeth at him in a snarling smile. “They still trust you to speak for them, Kurt? After all you’ve done? Unless...you haven’t told them?” She paused, but Kurt remained silent and her smile got broader. “Oh Kurt, honesty is the best policy. Have you really been letting them stumble around blind, just because you don’t trust everything that you remember and you can’t bring yourself to say the things that you  _know_  happened?” She broke into a full-out grin, terrifying in its sheer glee. “I really did do an excellent job with you, didn’t I? Ever since you were that tiny baby, I’ve always known that I would take great pleasure in destroying you one day, and look! I have!”

 

“You haven’t,” Hummel snapped back. “And you haven’t done enough to stop what you know is coming. They’re going to save the world, no matter how many of us don’t make it there, and I’m not going to let you hurt us again.”

 

“Oh, kid,” Sorin sighed. “You can’t stop me. That’s just a fact. I can do whatever I want to you, and there is no one left capable of stopping me. And is that Mercedes over there, all wrapped up? If you could stop people from hurting the ones you loved, you wouldn’t have slit your father’s throat when I told you to, your best friend would be standing beside you, not laying behind you, and you wouldn’t have helped my sister burn your town to ash. You can’t save anyone.”

 

Lauren’s mind stuttered to a stop. Over the roaring in her ears, she could faintly hear gasps and denials. Hummel stood in front of her, spine ramrod straight, blood trickling down his back from the crossbow wound. An arrow buzzed by, glancing off of Sorin’s shield. Lauren followed its path back to Quinn, her face set and angry.

 

“You’re disgusting,” she said, firing another easily deflected arrow. “You can’t do this to us, you can’t!”

 

“You’re weak,” Sorin laughed. “I can and will. If I can make Kurt murder his father, his friends’ families, everyone he’s ever known and then make him enjoy himself while he does it, what makes you think I can’t go further? I’ll admit that part was mostly for fun though. Burt came so close to ruining everything when he hid you all away in that shit heap of a town, and I guess I was still holding my grudge against Burt from when Kurt was just a little baby. I mean, Kurt could’ve been so useful, but about all he’s good for now is taking out my frustration on.” She looked back to Hummel, horribly sincere. “It was very cathartic to have you burn people to death and laugh about it, Kurt, it really was.”

 

Hummel was visibly shaking, but silent. Lauren took it as confirmation that what Sorin was saying was at least partially true, and _knew_  that her parents and sisters were dead with a sudden, staggering agony. She grabbed Hummel’s tunic and pulled him back towards her, away from Sorin’s outstretched hand, pushing him behind her and charging to attack.

 

She was aware of Mike, Tina and Rachel attacking as well, the only people left who were capable of holding a weapon and had one to use. Quinn fired another arrow that missed harmlessly, her aim thrown off. As soon as she got within range of Sorin, Lauren planted her feet and swung hard-

 

and bounced off of the ground ten feet behind where she had been standing, her head banging hard against the ground. When the stars cleared from her vision, Lauren tilted her head up. Everyone else had been tossed back just as far, except for Hummel, who had stepped forward again and was standing in front of Sorin.

 

“Are you done yet?” she asked lazily. “Really, what did you think would happen?”

 

“You’re so stupid,” Hummel said quietly. “You push all of them back and out of range, and you let me walk right up to you? I just told you that I wouldn’t let you hurt them again.” He opened his hand, revealing a fully formed spell, gyrating and glowing with power. Sorin’s eyes widened, and she tried to grab at Kurt, but he ducked below her grip, shoving the spell into the stone beneath them. He grabbed her leg with his other hand, bracing himself against her.

 

The blue lines of magic from the spell raced across the floor to the walls and up, and the entire passageway began to rumble and shake. Sorin kicked Hummel hard in the ribs, and pulled him up and off the ground, but it was too late. The rumbling and shaking got more violent, and Sorin looked up and actually looked afraid. Lauren followed her gaze up, and saw the rock beginning to divide and spilt, tiny chunks of gravel raining down on the two of them. The ceiling above Lauren's head was solid as it had been, the sintering of rock limited to the tunnel above Sorin and Hummel. Sorin dropped Kurt, shoving him away from her with a magic burst that also pushed her backwards, and Lauren watched in horror as Kurt turned back and smiled, actually  _smiled_  at her, before smashing his hand palm-down onto the ground. The blue glow in the ceiling disappeared in an instant, and the split rock came tumbling down, filling the entire corridor with a huge cloud of dust and debris.

 

Lauren hacked and coughed, dust settling all over her and getting in her lungs. She pulled her tunic over her mouth and blinked her eyes open, peering through the mess. People were screaming behind her, Brittany, Rachel, Artie, everyone was. Lauren crawled forward, staring at the wall of collapsed rock. Kurt was underneath there somewhere, she processed slowly. He’d just killed himself, and he’d smiled at her while he did. Lauren breathed out, but her breath got caught up in something between a cough and a sob. There was more rumbling from deeper in the fort, and the sounds of further collapsing.

 

“We can’t stay here,” Quinn said from behind her. “This whole place could come down.”

 

“He smiled,” Lauren said, unable to understand. “He knew he was going to die, he  _knew_ , and he smiled like he was happy about it.”

 

They were all crying, even Quinn as she tried to calmly assess the situation. It hit them hard, the revelation that everyone they knew was dead, their friends, their families, their mentors, everyone was dead and gone and had been for over a month and the pain was doubled by the shock of Mercedes’ death, of Kurt’s death, and Lauren couldn’t not think about watching those rocks fall, couldn’t stop imagining how it must have felt to be crushed to death, how at least it had probably been quicker than being stabbed in the lung and bleeding to death.

 

Mercedes was somewhere underneath that pile too, Lauren realized, her mind slowly catching up with the situation. She’d left her body further back along the corridor. At least their bodies would be unsalvageable by someone looking for corpses to raise as monsters. The ceiling rumbled overhead, and that was enough for her to realize how right Quinn was. She stood up slowly, reaching for her hammer out of habit, only to realize that she’d dropped it when Sorin had blasted her back and it had been buried. She offered a hand to Tina, who took it. “We can’t stay here.”

 

Finn looked at her mutinously. “We can’t leave Kurt, he could still be-”

 

“No. He’s dead, and he’s probably better off for it. He was happy, didn’t you see his face?” Lauren swiped her face across her sleeve, trying to find a part that wasn’t bloody to dry off her cheeks. “He gave us this chance, Mercedes gave us this chance, we can’t just stay here and wait to die.”

 

Finn looked at her, acceptance and despair mixed on his face. He finally nodded and stood. “Where do we go, though?”

 

“Home,” Quinn said. “Even if it’s gone, we need to see it. We need to go home.”

 

~*~

 

The portal room was still intact. They shouldered their packs, leaving Kurt’s and Mercedes’ where they had left them, and Artie and Rachel together cast the spell to open the portal. Rachel couldn’t stop shaking, and she couldn’t believe it. They were the heroes. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. They were supposed to defeat the villains, and they were supposed to have all gone home together. Home was supposed to be there when they got back. It wasn’t supposed to have been destroyed, and Kurt wasn’t supposed to have been forced to do it. He shouldn’t have been happy to die, and everything was so awful.

 

Her dads had encouraged her dreams, loved her even when she made mistakes, cuddled her and given her water when she had been sad. They had done so much for her, and she had loved them so much, and now they were dead. She had been unconscious on the back of the wagon when they had died, and she couldn’t remember what the last thing she had said to either of them was, if she had remembered to tell them how much she loved them or not.

 

The portal opened, revealing snowy, wintry woods. Rachel tightly wrapped her cloak around herself and stepped through without hesitation. A cold wind hit her in the face, and the windswept snow crunched under her feet. The trees in front of her were familiar, and so were the jagged mountains behind them. She had been looking at them all her life.

 

The portal shut with a crackle behind her, and Rachel turned to see the surviving members of the New Directions looking at her. She looked past Mike, holding up Puck, to see the familiar walls of Lilsholm behind them.

 

The wall were nearly intact, giving Rachel a false, sudden hope that was dashed against the rocks of reality when she saw the burned out gates and the still smouldering fires behind them. Lilsholm was gone. All that was left was walls, and burnt out husks of buildings.

 

“Oh,” Rachel whispered. The wind whistled through the trees in response.

 

~*~

 


End file.
